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ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS 

SAMUEL RICHARDSON 



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ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS 



SAMUEL RICHARDSON 



BY 

AUSTIN DOBSON 



Nefo fgorft 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
1902 

All rights reserved 



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<J° 






THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS, 

Two Co^-es Received 

OCT. 31 1902 

CLASsC^xXa Ne. 
GOPY A. 



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Copyright, 1902, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped November, 1902. 



Norfoocfc $«g$s 

J. S. Cutting & Co. — Berwick & Smith 
Norwood Maes. U.S.A. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I 

PAGE 

From Birth to Authorship 1 

CHAPTER II 
Pamela; or, Virtue Bewarded 26 

CHAPTER III 
Correspondence, 1739-48 51 

CHAPTER IV 

Clarissa ; or, The History of a Young Lady ... 78 

CHAPTER V 
Correspondence, 1749-54 106 

CHAPTER VI 
The History of Sir Charles Grandison .... 138 

CHAPTER VII 
Last Years and General Estimate . . . . 169 

Index 205 



v 



SAMUEL RICHAEDSON 

CHAPTEE I 

FROM BIRTH TO AUTHORSHIP 

A cloud hangs over the cradle of the author of 
Clarissa, which he himself has not sought to dissipate. 
He was born in 1689, in Derbyshire ; but in what place 
in that county, he was always, from some obscure 
motive, careful to conceal. His father, Samuel Eichard- 
son, like the father of Matthew Prior, was a joiner, — a 
business, his son informs us, " then more distinct from 
that of a carpenter than now it is with us." "He was 
a good draughtsman," he adds, " and understood archi- 
tecture." This, if it is to be taken literally, would mean 
that he must have been very much above the ordinary 
level of joiners and carpenters. 1 We are told further, 
that he was " a very honest man, descended of a family 
of middling note, in the county of Surrey, but which 
having for several generations a large number of 
children, the not large possessions were split and 

1 Mr. Bridgen, Richardson's son-in-law, says " cabinetmakers 
were, at that time, called Joiners" and he describes the elder 
Richardson as " a cabinetmaker, and afterwards a considerable 
importer of mahogany, in Aldersgate-street." He also confirms 
the statement as to his knowledge of architecture. He "was, in 
particular, an excellent Architect." 

B I 



2 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

divided, so that he and his brothers were put to 
trades; and the sisters were married to tradesmen." 
" My mother," the record goes on, " was also a 
good woman, of a family not ungenteel; but whose 
father and mother died in her infancy, within half- 
an-hour of each other, in the London pestilence of 
1665." 

According to his son, the skill and ingenuity of the 
elder Richardson, coupled with his superior under- 
standing, and " his remarkable integrity of heart and 
manners," served to recommend him to the special 
notice of several persons of rank, among whom were 
the Duke of Monmouth and the first Earl of Shaftes- 
bury. The favour with which he was regarded by 
these exalted patrons seems however to have become 
eventually a danger rather than a distinction, since 
on " the decollation of the first-named unhappy noble- 
man," Mr. Richardson, senior, " to his great detriment," 
found himself constrained to give up his London busi- 
ness, and retire to the unnamed retreat in Derbyshire 
where, with three more out of a total of nine children, 
his famous son was born. 1 Mrs. Barbauld is perhaps 
right in concluding that he must have entered more 
deeply into the political views of the decollated noble- 
man than he cared to admit, and that it is to this 
circumstance, rather than to any false pride in con- 
nection with the obscurity of his origin, that the 
persistent reticence of the novelist as to his place of 

1 Mr. Malcolm Kingsley Macmillan, who meditated a Life of 
Richardson, made every effort to discover this place. About 
1885, Mr. Macmillan advertised repeatedly in the now defunct 
Derby and Derbyshire Gazette, offering a reward to any parish 
clerk who would supply conclusive evidence upon the point, but 
no information was obtained. 



i.] FROM BIRTH TO AUTHORSHIP 3 

birth, is to be attributed, — though why, if this be the 
case, he should have thought it necessary to mention 
his father's connection with Monmouth at all, is a 
matter that requires explanation. 

However this may be — and the point is not of essen- 
tial importance to this biography — the Eichardson 
family apparently returned to London at some time 
after the Eevolution, for, according to Mchols's Literary 
Anecdotes, the youthful Samuel is said to have been 
educated " in the grammar school of Christ's Hospital." 
But his name is not to be traced in the school registers ; 
and the statement has moreover been held to be incon- 
sistent with the " common-school learning " which he 
admits to have been his limited equipment. Of this 
difficulty, Leigh Hunt, who had himself worn the blue 
gown and yellow stockings, offers what may possibly 
be regarded as a reasonable solution. " It is a fact not 
generally known," he says in the London Journal (Supp. 
No. 2, 1834), " that Eichardson . . . received what 
education he had (which was very little, and did not 
go beyond English) at Christ's Hospital. It may be 
wondered how he could come no better taught from a 
school which had sent forth so many good scholars ; 
but in his time, and indeed till very lately, that foun- 
dation was divided into several schools, none of which 
partook of the lessons of the others ; and Eichardson, 
agreeably to his father's intention of bringing him up 
to trade, was most probably confined to the writing- 
school, where all that was taught was writing and 
arithmetic." Leigh Hunt has the reputation of being 
an extremely conscientious investigator. He is not 
likely to have spoken without warranty ; and, in any 
case, his statements serve to show that it was possible 



4 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

to be educated at Christ's Hospital with very modest 
results. 1 

Of Kichardson's school days, however, whether at 
Christ's Hospital or elsewhere, we know nothing save 
what he himself has told us. But he must clearly have 
been born with that bias which Emerson regarded as a 
man's crowning boon from fortune. He was to succeed 
as a story-teller, and he is a story-teller " e'en from his 
boyish days." " I recollect," he says, " that I was early 
noted for having invention. I was not fond of play, as 
other boys ; my school-fellows used to call me Serious 
and Gravity ; and five of them particularly delighted 
to single me out, either for a walk, or at their father's 
houses, or at mine, to tell them stories, as they phrased 
it. Some I told them, from my reading, as true ; 
others from my head, as mere invention; of which 
they would be most fond, and often were affected by 
them. One of them particularly, I remember, was for 
putting me to write a history, as he called it, on the 
model of Tommy Pots ; I now forget what it was, only 
that it was of a servant-man preferred by a fine young 
lady (for his goodness) to a lord, who was a libertine. 
All my stories carried with them, I am bold to say, an 
useful moral." 

Mrs. Barbauld points out that a subsequent translator 
of Pamela and Clarissa, M. Prevost, the author of Manon 
Lescaut, was wont in like manner to amuse the Car- 
thusians of his convent with stories of his contriving ; 
though it may be doubted whether these were of the 

iThe matter is still very doubtful ; for against Leigh Hunt 
must be placed the statement of Mr. Bridgen that " it is certain 
that he [Richardson] was never sent to a more respectable 
seminary " than " a private grammar school " in Derbyshire. 



i.] FROM BIRTH TO AUTHORSHIP 5 

type of Tommy Pots. But it was part of the bias 
with which Eichardson was born, that he also, in his 
earliest youth, exhibited the less common proclivity 
towards letter- writing. Even in his childhood he was 
copious in his " epistolary correspondence/' and his 
facility in this way must sometimes have been a source 
of embarrassment, and even annoyance, to those about 
him. Before he was eleven, he wrote an expostulatory 
letter to a back-biting widow of near fifty, who, 
pretending to religion, was nevertheless continually 
fomenting quarrels and disturbances. He drew up a 
formidable array of appropriate texts, and, " assuming 
the style and address of a person in years/' warned her 
of the error of her ways. The letter, of course, was 
anonymous. But his handwriting was detected, and 
the recipient of the lecture complained bitterly, and 
not unnaturally, to the lad's mother. " My mother 
chid me for the freedom taken by such a boy with 
a woman of her years ; but knowing that her son was 
not of a pert or forward nature, but, on the con- 
trary, shy and bashful, she commended my principles, 
though she censured the liberty taken." It will be 
noted that the grown man who penned this reminis- 
cence seems to have had no shadow of misgiving as to 
the very priggish action of the boy. 

Another of Bichardson's characteristics closely 
allied to those already mentioned, may best be 
referred to in his own language. "I was an early 
favourite with all the young women of taste and 
reading in the neighbourhood. Half a dozen of them, 
when met to work with their needles, used, when 
they got a book they liked, and thought I should, to 
borrow me to read to them ; their mothers sometimes 



6 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

with them ; and both mothers and daughters used to 
be pleased with the observations they put me on 
making." 

" I was not more than thirteen, when some of these 
young women, unknown to each other, having a high 
opinion of my taciturnity, revealed to me their love- 
secrets, in order to induce me to give them copies to 
write after, or correct, for answers to their lover's 
letters : nor did any one of them ever know that I 
was the secretary to the others. I have been directed 
to chide, and even repulse, when an offence was either 
taken or given, at the very time that the heart of the 
chider or repulser was open before me, overflowing 
with esteem and affection; and the fair repulser, 
dreading to be taken at her word, directing this word, 
or that expression, to be softened or changed. One 
highly gratified with her lover's fervour, and vows of 
everlasting love, has said, when I have asked her 
direction ; I cannot tell you what to write ; but (her 
heart on her lips), you cannot write too kindly; all 
her fear was only, that she should incur slight for her 
kindness." 

Literary history, like other history, has a trick of 
repeating itself, and it has been whispered that a 
distinguished novelist of our own day, Mr. Thomas 
Hardy, held a somewhat similar office in his Wessex 
home, although, to be sure, he was the penman 
rather than the composer of the letters. The value 
to Eichardson of this elementary school of passion 
must have been considerable, but it would perhaps 
be rash to conclude that he found more than Pamela 
in this early environment. Clarissa and Clementina 
would be later growths. So much, indeed, he himself 



i.] FROM BIRTH TO AUTHORSHIP 7 

admits to the Dutch minister, Mr. J. Stinstra, who, 
in 1753, had asked him where he had obtained his 
accurate knowledge of humanity. "You think, Sir, 
you can account from my early secretaryship to young 
women in my father's neighbourhood, for the char- 
acters I have drawn of the heroines of my three works. 
But this opportunity did little more for me, at so 
tender an age, than point, as I may say, or lead my 
enquiries, as I grew up, into the knowledge of the 
female heart." That is to say, when he wrote Pamela, 
he had only " prospected " the country : when he wrote 
Clarissa, he had become a scientific explorer. And then 
he goes on to make certain observations with respect 
to that other untravelled region, the male heart, to 
which it may be useful to return hereafter. 

The first intention of the elder Eichardson had been 
to make his son a clergyman, a calling for which the 
boy had obvious qualifications. But owing to losses 
he sustained, he was unable to give him the requisite 
education, and he accordingly left him, at fifteen 
or sixteen, to choose a business for himself. Young 
Eichardson selected that of a printer, chiefly, he alleges, 
because he thought it would allow him to gratify a 
thirst for reading, which, in after years, he disclaimed. 
In 1706, being then seventeen, he was apprenticed to 
Mr. John Wilde of Stationers' Hall and Aldersgate 
Street. No picturesque reminiscences of this eventful 
portion of his life are forthcoming. Whether he was 
subjected to any of those mysterious rites which, as 
related in the veracious Memoirs of his contemporary, 
and subsequent assistant, Thomas Gent, accompanied, 
in printing-house " Chapels," the admission of a neo- 
phyte to the privileges of "Cuzship"; — whether he 



8 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

" dangled after his mistress, with, the great gilt Bible 
under his arm, to St. Bride's, on a Sunday, brought 
home the text, repeated the divisions of the discourse, 
dined at twelve, and regaled, upon a gaudy day, with 
buns and beer at Islington, or Mile-End " — like his 
crop-eared fellow in Foote's Minor — no biographer 
has told us. It may, nevertheless, be safely asserted 
that he did not, like Hogarth's Thomas Idle, tear his 
' Prentice's Guide, and peruse instead the profane broad- 
side ballads of what Gent calls the " wide-mouthed, 
stentorian hawkers." On the contrary, there is good 
ground, as we shall see presently, for concluding that, 
like Francis Goodchild, he duly shared his hymn- 
book at church with his master's daughter, and other- 
wise foreshadowed and anticipated the career of that 
excellent and exemplary young man. 

But although, in Mr. Wilde's shop, the " stream ran 
by his lips" — to use Mrs. Barbauld's poetical figure — 
he did not, during his probation, find it very easy to 
gratify his thirst for reading. "I served," he says 
of his apprenticeship, "a diligent seven years to it; 
to a master who grudged every hour to me that 
tended not to his profit, even of those times of leisure 
and diversion, which the refractoriness of my fellow- 
servants obliged him to allow them, and were usually 
allowed by other masters to their apprentices. I stole 
from the hours of rest and relaxation, my reading 
times for improvement of my mind; and, being 
engaged in correspondence with a gentleman, greatly 
my superior in degree, and of ample fortune, who, 
had he lived, intended high things for me ; these were 
all the opportunities I had in my apprenticeship to 
carry it on. But this little incident I may mention; 



i.] FROM BIRTH TO AUTHORSHIP 9 

I took care that even my candle was of my own pur- 
chasing, that I might not, in the most trifling instance, 
make my master a sufferer (and who used to call me 
the pillar of his house) and not to disable myself by 
watching or sitting-up, to perform my duty to him 
in the day time." The unknown gentleman's letters, 
it appears subsequently, related mainly to his own 
travels and transactions; he was "a master of the 
epistolary style," and his curious fancy for corre- 
sponding with a city printer's apprentice who wanted 
practice in pen-craft, might have supplied the Philos- 
opher Square with a fresh illustration of the " eternal 
fitness of things." Eventually the gentleman died, 
depriving his young friend of a valuable patron ; and 
by request, the letters, on both sides, were burned. 
But, as far as Richardson was concerned, they served 
their turn by giving readiness and fluency to his 
natural habit of the pen. They may even have done 
more. " Early familiar Letter-writing," he said later 
in Clarissa, " is one of the greatest openers and 
improvers of the mind that man or woman can be 
employed in." 

If his apprenticeship began in 1706 and lasted seven 
years, it must have come to an end in 1713. For five 
or six years more he continued to work as a compositor 
and corrector of the press, and part of the time as an 
overseer. Then, in 1719, he took up his freedom, and 
began business as a master printer in an unidentified 
court in Fleet Street, filling his spare time by the prep- 
aration for the booksellers of prefaces, indexes, and 
what he terms vaguely " honest dedications." It is 
probably to this occupation that we owe the elaborate 
Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, etc., 



10 SAMUEL RICHAKDSON [chap. 

contained in the Histories of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir 
Charles Grandison, which he prepared in later life to 
accompany those novels.. In 1721, two years after he 
had set up for himself, he confirmed his resemblance to 
Hogarth's " Industrious Apprentice " by marrying the 
daughter of his old master, John Wilde. This, with 
the exception that she gave the wrong Christian name 
to the lady, was Mrs. Barbauld's original statement, 
although some recent authorities, relying on Nichols's 
Literary Anecdotes, have preferred to believe that his 
father-in-law was one Allington Wilde of Clerkenwell. 
But Richardson's latest biographer, Miss Clara Thom- 
son, has shown conclusively that, — as is moreover 
apparent from Richardson's will, — Allington Wilde was 
his brother-in-law, and that his wife, Martha Wilde, to 
whom, by the registers of Charterhouse Chapel, he was 
married on the 23rd November 1721, was the daughter 
of John Wilde of Aldersgate Street and Martha A. 
Allington, after whom Mrs. Richardson's brother was 
no doubt named. 

"It's not Mrs. Brown that lies there," writes 
Thackeray's Brown the Elder, explaining dolefully 
to Brown the Younger that a certain sarcophagus at 
Funchal does not enclose his late aunt's remains. Prob- 
ably Martha Wilde, too, had predecessors, although 
we need perhaps scarcely go as far as to conclude 
with Miss Thomson that Richardson's marriage was 
" prompted mainly by prudential considerations." But 
from a sentimentalist, sentiment must be expected, 
and in a later letter to a correspondent, he more than 
hints at previous love-affairs, which, apart from the 
fact that, owing to his bashfulness, they seem always 
to have originated with the weaker sex, had also the 



i.] FROM BIRTH TO AUTHORSHIP 11 

drawback of being generally impracticable. " A pretty 
ideot," he writes, " was once proposed, with very high 
terms, his [Richardson's] circumstances considered; 
her worthy uncle thought this man [E. again] would 
behave compassionately to her. — A violent Eoman 
Catholic lady was another, of a fine fortune, a zealous 
professor ; whose terms were (all her fortune in her 
own power — a very apron-string tenure ! ) two years' 
probation, and her confessor's report in favour of his 
being a true proselyte at the end of them. — Another, 
a gay, high-spirited, volatile lady, whose next friend 
offered to be his friend, in fear of her becoming the 
prey (at the public places she constantly frequented) 
of some vile fortune-hunter. Another there was whom 
his soul loved ; but with a reverence — Hush ! — Pen, 
lie thee down ! " — And then comes what the writer 
elsewhere describes as " an interrupting sigh," and " a 
short abruption." Mrs. Barbauld, who thinks that 
the " violent Eoman Catholic lady " may have given 
the first hint of Clementina in Sir Charles Grandison, 
adds that the tender circumstances last hinted at were 
supposed by the novelist's friends to be obscurely 
shadowed out in TJie History of Mrs. Beaumont, which 
she prints at the end of her fifth volume, and which 
Eichardson could never relate without a certain sus- 
picious animation. But his personal love-affairs, as far 
as they have been revealed to us, possess but slender 
biographical importance, and certainly lack the element 
of romance which he was able to infuse into his 
stories. 

Beyond the births successively of six children, all of 
whom but one, a boy, died in infancy, there is little to 
chronicle in Eichardson's life for the next few years. 



12 SAMUEL RICHAKDSON [chap. 

Almost the only notable incident between his first 
marriage and the publication of Pamela, was his brief 
connection with The True Briton, a bi-weekly political 
paper established by Philip, Duke of Wharton, in June 
1723 (just before the exile of Atterbury), in opposi- 
tion to the Government, and in the interests of the 
Jacobites. This, which was published by T. Payne, 
near Stationers' Hall, was at first printed by Eichard- 
son, whose name, fortunately for himself, did not 
appear, since an information was speedily lodged 
against the publisher in regard to Nos. 3, 4, 5, and 6 
as being more than " common libels." It is suggested 
by Nichols in his Literary Anecdotes that No. 6, which 
refers, among other things, to the Bishop of Eochester, 
may have been written by Eichardson himself. But 
Wharton's biographer, Mr. J. E. Eobinson, plainly 
attributes it to Wharton ; and it is extremely improb- 
able that Eichardson's cautious, and even timorous 
nature would have permitted him to put pen to any 
performance of the kind. It is still more improbable 
that the obscure printer of The True Briton, with which, 
moreover, he prudently severed his connection at the 
above-mentioned sixth number, could ever have been 
on really intimate terms with the brilliant and witty 
profligate, whose portrait after Jervas, coupled with 
" His Grace's Protest against the Bill for Inflicting 
certain Pains and Penalties on Francis late Lord 
Bishop of Rochester," was at the time in all the print- 
shops ; and who, two years later, left England for 
ever. Yet not only has it been suggested that Eichard- 
son had special opportunities for studying refined 
libertinism in the person of Wharton, but that he 
obtained a sufficient acquaintance with his character to 



i.] FKOM BIKTH TO AUTHORSHIP 13 

make him, a quarter of a century later, the prototype 
of Robert Lovelace. This surely can be no more than 
the exaggeration of the desire which must find an 
original for everything. That certain lines of Pope's 
character of Wharton in the Epistle to Lord Cobham, 
and notably — 

" Women and Fools must like him or he dies " — 

might be applied to Clarissa's betrayer, is no doubt 
true ; but they might also be applied with equal truth 
to Rowe's Lothario (a much more likely model for 
Lovelace !) or to the Don Juan of Moliere. When 
Richardson drew his cold-blooded hero, Wharton had 
been dead for seventeen years ; and he himself had been 
studying human nature in too many places to need to 
fall back upon his recollections of a meteoric rake of 
quality, whom he may never even have encountered in 
the flesh. For what knowledge does the anonymous 
setter-up of treasonable political matter obtain of the 
writer who prepares the " copy " ! One has only to 
turn to the life of another, though perhaps humbler, 
contemporary printer, Thomas Gent of York, to note 
with what meticulous precautions, about this very 
time, this same Bishop of Rochester to whom reference 
has been made, surrounded the issue of a private 
pamphlet. Gent never knew who his employer was, 
until he afterwards recognised him on his way to the 
Tower as a prisoner. 

In 1724 Richardson moved from Fleet Street into 
Salisbury Square, or, as it was then called, Salisbury 
Court, where he occupied a house " in the centre " 
of the Court now no longer in existence. Oddly 
enough the next circumstance to be recorded in 



14 SAMUEL KICHARDSON [chap. 

his career comes from the records of the above- 
mentioned Thomas Gent. "After this/' says Gent, 
speaking of a date following the return of George I. 
from Hanover in 1724, "Mr. Woodfall [i.e. the 
first of that name] was so kind [as] to recommend 
me to the ingenious Mr. Richardson, in Salisbury 
Court ; with whom I staid to finish his part of the 
Dictionary which he had from the booksellers, com- 
posed of English, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. " But 
Richardson found a better friend than either Wharton 
or Henry Woodfall in Arthur Onslow, the Speaker of 
the House of Commons, through whom he was employed 
to print the Journals of the House, a first instalment 
of twenty-six volumes of which he duly completed. 
Mr. Onslow seems to have had a benevolent regard for 
his protege, and frequently entertained him at that 
pleasant Ember or Imber Court by the Mole at Thames 
Ditton, which he had acquired in 1720 on his marriage 
to Miss Ann Bridges. But, as Mrs. Barbauld pertinently 
observes, "polite regards are sometimes more easily 
obtained than money from the court end of the town. 
Mr. R. did not find this branch of his business the one 
which yielded him the quickest returns. He thus 
writes to his friend Aaron Hill : ' As to my silence, I 
have been at one time exceedingly busy in getting 
ready some volumes of Journals, to entitle myself to a 
payment which yet I never had, no, not to the value 
of a shilling, though the debt is upwards of . three 
thousand pounds, and though I have pressed for it, 
and been excessively pressed for the want of it. ? " His 
position as Printer of the Journals of the House of 
Commons must, nevertheless, have brought him work 
in other ways. 



i.] FROM BIRTH TO AUTHORSHIP 15 

On the 25th January 1731, Martha Eichardson died, 
her death being hastened by the death of one of her 
children, perhaps the boy William, who lived to be 
four years old. In the following year Eichardson 
married Elizabeth Leake, sister of James Leake, a 
bookseller at Bath, and no doubt the " J. Leake," whose 
name appears, with those of Eivington and John 
Osborn, on the title-page of the book known generally 
as the Familiar Letters. By his second wife he had 
several daughters, four of whom, Mary, Martha, Anne, 
and Sarah, as will be seen hereafter, survived their 
father. A " promising boy," Samuel, was born in 1739 
and died in 1740. Eichardson seems to have been an 
affectionate father, and his many bereavements did 
not tend to improve his health, or diminish his nervous 
sensibility. From 1736 to 1737 he was the printer of 
the Daily Journal, and in 1738 of the Daily Gazetteer. 
In the former of these years he was also appointed 
printer to a so-called " Society for the Encouragement 
of Learning," which, among other things, was intended 
to make authors independent of publishers. But even 
a ducal President, titled Trustees, and a paid Secretary 
were ineffectual to float the enterprise, and it eventu- 
ally collapsed for want of a Besant to keep it going. 

"He, they say, who is not handsome by Twenty, 
strong by Thirty, wise by Forty, rich by Fifty, will 
never be either handsome, strong, wise, or rich." Thus 
writes Eichardson at p. 92 of the Familiar Letters. At 
this date, the question of strength and good looks had, 
in his case, long been settled. He was a weakly and 
nervous valetudinarian, already wedded to a special 
diet. As to wisdom, he had learned a good deal of 
prudence and common sense in his business ; and in 



16 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

spite of deferred Government payments, must have 
been, at fifty, his age in 1739, well-to-do and com- 
fortable as to his means. Already he had begun, after 
the fashion of the prosperous citizens of his day, to 
indulge himself with a country residence, to which, 
like the tradesman in No. xxxiii. of the Connois- 
seur, he retired from Saturday to Monday. One of the 
unpublished letters addressed to him in July 1736, 
speaks of a retreat called Corney House, which may 
have been a house of that name by the waterside at 
Chiswick, and may also have been in some other 
suburb. But in 1739 he took a lease of part of 
another house, then in the open country, close to 
Hammersmith turnpike ; and now known as No. Ill 
(formerly No. 49), The Grange, North End Eoad, 
Eulham. The Grange had originally been built about 
1714 by a certain John, or Justice Smith, on the site 
of two cottages dating from the time of Charles II. 
It consisted of two houses, in the northernmost of 
which Justice Smith lived until his death in 1725, at 
which time the other, or south house, was occupied 
jointly by the Countess of Eanelagh (widow of the 
first Earl of Eanelagh) and a Mr. Samuel Vanderplank, 
often mentioned in Eichardson's letters. Eichardson, 
as already stated, took up his residence in the North 
House in 1739. It was well arranged and roomy (he 
says in one of his letters that he could make ten beds, 
and give guests a separate parlour) ; and, as to its 
environment, naturally far less hedged in by buildings 
than it is at present. The annual rent he paid to 
Mr. Vanderplank was twenty-five pounds. At the 
back of the house was a pleasant garden, which con- 
tained an historical grotto or summer-house, where, as 



l] FKOM BIRTH TO AUTHORSHIP 17 

we shall see, he was wont to work and read his produc- 
tions to his admirers. Of this grotto no trace is now 
left, and it is supposed to have disappeared in 1801. 
In vol. iv. of Mrs. Barbauld's edition of the corre- 
spondence, there is an engraving of the twin houses 
by T. Richards, which shows them as they looked about 
1800, but alterations in the windows, the addition of 
a balcony, and the facing of the northern portion with 
stucco have made it difficult to reconcile its past with 
its present appearance. The name, The Grange, dates 
from 1836. What its first name was, and what espe- 
cially was its name when, from 1739 to 1754, its tenant 
was Richardson, have not been ascertained. One of 
the novelist's correspondents, a Mr. Reich, of Leipzig 
— who must have visited him towards the close of his 
tenancy, since he refers to Sir Charles Grandison as 
already existent — speaks of it as " Selby House " ; but 
as this is the house in which the Miss Byron of the 
novel spent her girlhood, it is doubtful whether it was 
more than a playful appellation. Such as it was, how- 
ever, the northern half of The Orange was Richardson's 
country home for fifteen years, or until he moved to 
Parson's Green. He kept one maid-servant there all 
the year round ; he sent others to stay there when 
they were out of health ; and as he grew older, he 
lived there himself for much longer periods than the 
mere week-ends which had at first been the limits of 
his escape from the bustle of Salisbury Court. 1 

!The Grange, after other tenants, was, from 1867 to 1898, 
the residence of Sir E. Burne-Jones, Bart., the distinguished 
painter. It is now in the occupation of Mr. Fairfax Murray. 
Many of the above particulars as to the history of the house 
are derived from vol. ii. of the exhaustive Fulham Old and New 
of Mr. Charles James Feret, 1900. 
c 



18 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

When, in 1739, Richardson took his Hammersmith 
house, he had, notwithstanding his advanced age, done 
little in literature save the dedications and indexes 
to which reference has been made, It is probable, 
however, that, about this time, he was already occupied 
in editing, for the above-mentioned Society for the 
Encouragement of Literature, a part of the correspon- 
dence of Sir Thomas Eoe relating to his embassy to 
the Ottoman Porte. But it is to 1739 that belongs 
the book which undoubtedly prompted Pamela, and 
which — partly from its having fallen into neglect, 
and partly also from the perhaps intentionally vague 
way in which he himself speaks of a production 
his subsequent successes made him willing to forget 
— has sometimes been confused with Pamela itself. 
In 1739, two of his particular friends, Mr. Charles 
Rivington of St. Paul's Churchyard, and Mr. John 
Osborn of Paternoster Row, invited him to prepare for 
them " a little volume of Letters, in a common style, 
on such subjects as might be of use to those country 
readers, who were unable to indite for themselves. 
Will it be any harm, said I, in a piece you want to be 
written so low, if we should instruct them how they 
should think and act in common cases, as well as 
indite ? They were the more urgent with me to begin 
the little volume for this hint. I set about it. . . . " 

At this point, both for clearness' sake and the 
avoidance of misconception, it will be well to adopt 
Richardson's plan of " a short abruption," and go on 
with the story of the volume initiated by Messrs. 
Osborn and Rivington. With these model letters, as 
already stated, originated the idea of Richardson's 
first novel of Pamela. It is true that they were not 



i.] FROM BIRTH TO AUTHORSHIP 19 

published until a few weeks after Pamela had appeared; 
but as they undoubtedly preceded that book in con- 
ception, and probably in execution, they may legiti- 
mately be treated first. They appeared in January 
1741 {Pamela having been issued in the preceding 
November), and their full title is as follows : Letters 
written to and for particular Friends, on the most im- 
portant Occasions. Directing not only the requisite Style 
and Forms to be observed in writing Familiar Letters ; 
but how to think and act justly and prudently, in the 
common Concerns of Human Life. The title moreover 
states that the volume contains "One Hundred and 
Seventy-three Letters, None of which were ever before 
Published"; and it was "printed for C. Rivington, 
in St. Paul's Churchyard ; J. Osborn, in Pater-noster 
Row; and J. Leake, at Bath" — this last, no doubt, 
being Richardson's brother-in-law. The price was two 
shillings and sixpence, and the Gentleman } s Magazine, 
in which it is advertised, reproduced, at page 34 of 
its eleventh volume, one of the letters — "Advice to 
a Friend against going to Law " (No. 144). Mr. Urban 
gives no hint as to the author, whose " Preface " lays 
stress upon his having, among other things, devoted 
exceptional attention to the details of discreet court- 
ship and the disadvantages of ill-considered matrimony. 
" Orphans, and Ladies of independent Fortunes, he [the 
compiler] has particularly endeavoured to guard against 
the insidious Arts of their flattering and selfish Depen- 
dents, and the clandestine Addresses of Fortune-hunters, 
those Beasts of Prey, as they may well be called, who 
spread their Snares for the innocent and thoughtless 
Heart." The management of this final metaphor is 
not perhaps of the happiest. As we have seen, how- 



20 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

ever, in the case of the " high-spirited volatile lady " 
who wished to marry the author, the eighteenth- 
century fortune-hunter was distinctly a danger to be 
reckoned with. 

But while the affairs of the heart naturally occupy 
a considerable portion of the Familiar Letters, — we 
should imagine indeed that there can be few complica- 
tions arising from the undisciplined employment of 
that organ which are left untreated, — many of these 
fictitious utterances show clearly that, from his Fleet 
Street shop, Richardson had looked not unintelligently 
upon life in general. Indeed, in regard to the question 
of the law's delays, it might almost be conjectured 
that he was still smarting under an unfavourable 
personal experience. Here is the close of his epistle 
to the would-be litigant : — " Then you may be plung'd 
into the bottomless Gulf of Chancery, where you 
begin with Bills and Answers, containing Hundreds 
of Sheets at exorbitant Prices, 15 Lines in a Sheet, 
and 6 Words in a Line, (and a Stamp to every Sheet) 
barefacedly so contrived to pick your Pocket: Then 
follow all the Train of Examinations, Interrogatories, 
Exceptions, Bills amended, References for Scandal and 
Impertinence, new Allegations, new Interrogatories, 
new Exceptions, on Pretence of insufficient Answers, 
Replies, Rejoinders, Sur-re joinders, Butters, Rebutters, 
and Sur-rebutters ; till, at last, when you have danc'd 
thro' this blessed Round of Preparation, the Tryal 
before the Master of the Rolls comes next; Appeals 
follow from his Honour to the Chancellor ; then from 
the Chancellor to the House of Lords ; and sometimes 
the Parties are sent from thence for a new Tryal in 
the Courts below — Good Heavens! What wise Man, 



i.] FROM BIRTH TO AUTHORSHIP 21 

permit me to repeat, would enter himself into this 
confounding Circle of the Law ? " 

Here, from another letter, is a " prospect" of con- 
temporary politics, which reminds one of some of the 
later deliverances of Fielding in the Covent Garden 
Journal : — " For while some are made as black as Devils 
on one Side, they are made as ivhite as Angels on the 
other. They never did one good thing, says the Enemy. 
They never did one bad one, says the Friend. . . . 
Mean time one Side goes on, accusing without Mercy ; 
the other, acquitting without Shame. ? Tis the Business 
of one Set of Papers to bespatter and throw Dirt; and 
of the other to follow after them, with a Scrubbing- 
brush and a Dish-clout : And after all — the one bedaubs 
so plentifully, and the other wipes off so slovenly, that, 
let me be hang'd, Bob, if Fd appear on 'Change with 
the Coat on my Back that a certain great Man stalks 
about in, without Concern, when these Dawbers and 
Scoiverers have done their worst and their best upon 
it. But 'tis a great Matter to be used to such a Coat. 
And a great Happiness, I'll warrant, your Namesake 
[Sir Robert Walpole] thinks it, that with all this 
Rubbing and Scrubbing, it does not appear threadbare 
yet, after twenty Years' Wear, and a hundred People 
trying to pick Holes in it." 

If personal experiences have dictated some of these 
communications, personal predilections peep out in 
others. The writer is severe in matters of costume. 
"I have been particularly offended, let me tell you, 
my Dear [he writes to a young lady], at your new 
Riding Habit, which is made so extravagantly in the 
Mode, that one cannot easily distinguish your Sex 
by it. For you neither look like a modest Girl in it, 



22 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

nor an agreeable Boy. Some conformity to the Fashion 
is allowable. But a cock'd Hat, a lac'd Jacket, a 
Fop's Peruke, what strange Metamorphoses do they 
make ! " Elsewhere, he courageously lifts up his voice 
against the undue "Love of Singing and Musick." 
" It may tend/' he tells an imaginary correspondent, 
"for so it naturally does, to enervate the Mind, and 
make you haunt musical Societies, Operas and Con- 
certs ; and what Glory is it to a Gentleman if he were 
even a fine Performer, that he can strike a String, 
touch a Key, or sing a Song with the Grace and 
Command of a hired Musician?" Upon the topic of 
the Stage he is even less sympathetic. He does not, 
indeed, like Goldsmith to his brother-in-law, Hodson, 
brand acting as " an abominable resource which neither 
becomes a man of honour, nor a man of sense, 5 ' but 
in the character of a Father whose Son, " reduced by 
his own Extravagance," wishes to turn player, he 
writes as follows : " You must consider, that tho' in 
the gay Trappings of that Employment a Man may 
represent a Gentleman, yet none can be farther from 
that Character if a perpetual Dependence be the worst 
Kind of Servility. In the first Place, the Company 
you will be in a manner obliged to keep, will be such as 
will tend little to the Improvement of your Mind, or 
Amendment of your Morals : To the Master of the Com- 
pany you list in, you must be obsequious to a Degree of 
Slavery. Not one of an Audience that is able to hiss, 1 
but you must fear, and each single Person you come to 

1 Cf. Johnson's Prologue to Goldsmith's Good Natur'd 
Man : — 

" This night, our wit, the pert apprentice cries, 
Lies at my feet, I hiss him, and he dies." 



i.] FROM BIRTH TO AUTHORSHIP 23 

know personally, you must oblige on every Occasion 
that Offers, to engage their Interest at your Benefit." 
He will, moreover, have " the mortifying Knowledge of 
being deem'd a Vagrant by the Laws of his Country." 
Many of the other letters have characteristic touches. 
A Sea Officer, writing to his wife from abroad, sends 
her a " small Parcel of Cyprus wine " ; while a Sailor, 
not to be behind-hand, forwards to his Peggy from 
Barbadoes, " as a Token of my Love," six bottles of 
Citron- water, 1 which " is what, they say, Ladies drink, 
when they can get it." To which Peggy returns, in the 
true " Rule Britannia " vein, — " Let who will speak 
against Sailors; they are the Glory and the Safeguard 
of the Land. And what would have become of Old 
England long ago but for them ? I am sure the lazy 
good-for-nothing Land-lubbers would never have pro- 
tected us from our cruel Foes." Another passage shows 
a Fielding-like appreciation of the wrongs of the 
"inferior clergy." " Parson Matthews goes on preach- 
ing and living excellently, and has still as many Ad- 
mirers as Hearers, but no preferment : While old clumsy 
Parson Dromedary is made a Dean, and has Hopes, by 
his Sister's means, who is a Favourite of a certain 
great Man, to be a Bishop." Towards the end of the 
book are eleven letters from " a young Lady in Town 
to her Aunt in the Country," describing the sights of 
London and Westminster. These, in some respects, 
are the most interesting in the collection. Vauxhall, 
of course, is visited, and the writer sits in one of the 

1 " Plenty of Barbadoes-water for the ladies " — was, it will be 
remembered, considerately provided by Lieut. Hatchway for 
Commodore Trunnion's wedding supper {Peregrine Pickle; 
ch. ix.). 



24 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

famous supper-boxes in the Grove, which is decorated 
by a scene from Hippisley's Hob in the Well. At 
Westminster Abbey, she censures Mat Prior's monu- 
ment as " a sad Instance of Pride beyond the Grave ! " 
and condemns, very properly, Gay's flippant epitaph 
on himself. As regards Sir Cloudesley Shovel, she 
follows Addison, which shows that Richardson must 
have read his Spectator more diligently than he would 
have Cave to believe : " I thought (says the writer of the 
letter) he [the Admiral] was a rough honest Tar; yet 
his Effigies makes him a great Beau, with a fine flowing 
full-bottomed Periwig, such a one, but much finer, and 
more in Buckle, than that we have seen our Lawyer 
Mr. Kettleby 1 wear at our Assizes." At Bedlam, to 
which, like the ladies in the Rake's Progress, she also 
goes, she has the unpleasant experience of being mis- 
taken by one of the Patients for the particular " Betty 
Careless " who is the cause of his anguish. u No sooner 
did I put my Pace to the Grate, but he leap'd from his 
Bed, and called me, with frightful Pervency, to come 
into his Eoom. . . . My Cousin assured me such 
Fancies were frequent upon these Occasions." 2 At 
the Play, she witnesses Hamlet, and is justly severe 
upon " the low Scenes of Harlequinery ," by which it was 
followed. Finally, there is a letter, not of this series, 

1 It is strange that in these model epistles, Richardson should 
mention a real personage. Kettlehy, whose full-bottomed wig- 
is historical, was a subscriber to Fielding's Miscellanies of 1743 ; 
is mentioned in the Causidicade ; and was, by many, identified as 
the Parson of Hogarth's Midnight Modem Conversation. 

2 Until late in the Eighteenth Century Bedlam was a show and 
place of meeting. Visitors were admitted for a penny each ; and 
John Taylor says that his father courted his mother there (Records 
of my Life, 1832, i. 3). 



i.] FROM BIRTH TO AUTHORSHIP 25 

which graphically describes " Execution Day/' with all 
the horrors of that " Diversion of the Populace " against 
which Fielding and other contemporaries so persist- 
ently appealed. There is a passage in it which might 
have come direct from the autobiography of the 
" Prisoner's Chaplain/' Silas Told. " One of the Bodies 
was carried to the Lodging of his Wife, who not being 
in the way to receive it, they [the Mob] immediately 
hawked it about to every Surgeon they could think of ; 
and when none would buy it, they rubb'd Tar all over 
it, and left it in a Field hardly cover'd with Earth." 

Richardson was ashamed of the Familiar Letters. 
He seems never to have added to them, for the number 
given in the seventh edition, published after his death, 
with his name, is the same as that in the first, viz. : — 
one hundred and seventy-three. "This volume of 
letters " — he wrote to a friend — " is not worthy of 
your perusal." They [the letters] were " intended for 
the lower classes of people," — he says again in another 
place; and Mrs. Barbauld observes that the book is 
" seldom found any where but in the servant's drawer." 
Why it should take refuge there in particular, is not 
clear, since it is not exclusively calculated for the 
meridian of the kitchen. ISTor is it clear why Jeffrey 
in his review of Mrs. Barbauld's book in the Edinburgh 
for October 1804, should especially recommend it as 
likely to be " of singular use to Mr. Wordsworth and 
his friends in their great scheme of turning all our 
poetry into the language of the common people." In 
both cases it would seem as if the writers knew little 
experimentally of the work referred to. 



CHAPTER II 

PAMELA; OR, VIRTUE REWARDED 

In the preceding chapter, Richardson's account of the 
origin of his first novel was purposely suspended in 
order to pursue the story of the collection of Familiar 
Letters which he had undertaken to prepare for 
Messrs. Rivington and shorn. That account is now 
resumed. " In the progress of it [the collection]/' — 
he goes on to say, — " writing two or three letters to 
instruct handsome girls, who were obliged to go out 
to service/ as we phrase it, how to avoid the snares 
that might be laid against their virtue," — a story 
which he had heard many years before recurred to 
his thoughts. " And hence sprung Pamela" " Little 
did I think, at first/' he adds elsewhere, " of making 
one, much less two volumes of it." ... "I thought 
the story, if written in an easy and natural manner, 
suitably to the simplicity of it, might possibly intro- 
duce a new species of writing, that might possibly turn 
young people into a course of reading different from 
the pomp and parade of romance-writing, and dis- 
missing the improbable and marvellous, with which 
novels generally abound, might tend to promote the 
cause of religion and virtue." His wife, with a young 
lady friend who lived with them, grew interested in 
the book during its progress, and were in the habit of 

26 



chap. ii.] PAMELA; OB, VIBTXJE BEWABDED 27 

coming every evening to his little writing-closet with, 
" Have you any more of Pamela, Mr. E. ? We are 
come to hear a little more of Pamela/' etc. With this 
encouragement from his " worthy-hearted " better-half 
and her companion, Pamela got on so fast that, begun 
on 10th November 1739, it was finished 10th January 
1740. Mrs. Barbauld makes this three months. It 
was only two ; and the fact that, in the intervals of 
a business to which he was devoted, its author con- 
trived to produce two volumes of 296 and 396 pages 
each so rapidly, is no mean testimony to the fertility 
of his imagination and the promptitude of his pen. 1 

Which of the epistles to young women first set him on 
his task, is not now discernible. The Familiar Letters 
of 1741 contain at least three which bear indirectly 
upon this theme. One is No. cxxviii., headed: "A 
Father to a Daughter in Service, on hearing of her 
Master's attempting her Virtue," and it is x* llowed by 
the daughter's reply ; a third, No. lxii., relates the 
experiences of a young girl, who, coming to town 
without friends, narrowly escapes the fate of the 
heroine of Hogarth's famous Progress, and her 
" shocking Story " is authenticated by a note stating 
that it is "Fact in every Circumstance," taken from 
the mouth of the young girl herself. 2 But the incident 

1 In an unpublished letter to Aaron Hill at South Kensing- 
ton, he adds some particulars to this account. " For twenty- 
Years I had proposed to different Persons (who thought the 
Subject too humble for them) that of Pamela; and it was 
owing to an Accident (The writing the little Piece of Familiar 
Letters) that I entered upon it myself. And its strange Success 
at Publication is still my Surprize." (26 Jan. 1746-7). 

2 That these dangers of Eighteenth-Century London were not 
wholly the growth of Richardson's imagination, is clear from an 
anecdote given in Dr. John Brown's Horse Subsecivse, 1862, p. 25. 



28 SAMUEL KICHABDSON [chap. 

which proximately inspired Richardson, and which 
(as Scott suggests) was probably derived from the 
corresponding gentleman of his 'prentice days, is 
related by him in one of his letters to Aaron Hill. 
As it serves to explain the subject of the novel, it may 
be given here in Richardson's own words : — 

" I will now write to your question — Whether there 
was any original groundwork of fact, for the general 
foundation of Pamela's story. 

"About twenty-five years ago, a gentleman, with 
whom I was intimately acquainted (but who, alas ! is 
now no more!) met with such a story as that of 
Pamela, in one of the summer tours which he used 
to take for his pleasure, attended with one servant 
only. At every inn he put up at, it was his way 
to inquire after curiosities in its neighbourhood, either 
ancient or modern; and particularly he asked who 
was the owner of a fine house, as it seemed to him, 
beautifully situated, which he had passed by (describ- 
ing it) within a mile or two of the inn. 

" It was a fine house, the landlord said. The owner 
was Mr. B. a gentleman of a large estate in more 
counties than one. That his and his lady's history 
engaged the attention of everybody who came that 
way, and put a stop to all other inquiries, though the 
house and gardens were well worth seeing. The lady, 
he said, was one of the greatest beauties in England ; 
but the qualities of her mind had no equal : beneficent, 
prudent, and equally beloved by high and low. That 
she had been taken at twelve years of age, for the 
sweetness of her manners and modesty, and for an 

understanding above her years, by Mr. B 's mother, 

a truly worthy lady, to wait on her person. Her 



ii.] PAMELA; OB, VIRTUE BEWABDED 29 

parents, ruined by suretiships, were remarkably honest 
and pious, and bad instilled into their daughter's mind 
the best principles. When their misfortunes happened 
first, they attempted a little school, in their village, 
where they were much beloved; he teaching writing 
and the first rules of arithmetic to boys, his wife 
plain needlework to girls, and to knit and spin ; but 
that it answered not ; and when the lady took their 
child, the industrious man earned his bread by day 
labour, and the lowest kinds of husbandry. 

" That the girl, improving daily in beauty, modesty, 
and genteel and good behaviour, by the time she was 
fifteen, engaged the attention of her lady's son, a 
young gentleman of free principles, who, on her lady's 
death, attempted, by all manner of temptations and 
devices, to seduce her. That she had recourse to as 
many innocents stratagems to escape the snares laid 
for her virtue ; once, however, in despair, having been 
near drowning ; that, at last, her noble resistance, 
watchfulness, and excellent qualities, subdued him, 
and he thought fit to make her his wife. That she 
behaved herself with so much dignity, sweetness, and 
humility, that she made herself beloved of everybody, 
and even by his relations, who at first despised her ; 
and now had the blessings both of rich and poor, and 
the love of her husband. 

" The gentleman who told me this, added, that he 
had the curiosity to stay in the neighbourhood from 
Friday to Sunday, that he might see this happy couple 
at church, from which they never absented themselves : 
that, in short, he did see them ; that her deportment 
was all sweetness, ease, and dignity mingled : that he 
never saw a lovelier woman : that her husband was as 



30 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

fine a man, and seemed even proud of his choice : and 
that she attracted the respects of the persons of rank 
present, and had the blessings of the poor. — The 
relater of the story told me all this with transport. " 

The novel, of which the above letter supplies the 
outline, was published in November 1740, in two 
volumes, and its publishers were, of course, Messrs. 
Eivington and Osborn. After the fashion of Defoe, 
its contents were summarised with much particularity 
on its title-page, which ran as follows : — Pamela : or, ^ 
Virtue Rewarded. In a Series of Familiar Letters from a 
beautiful Young Damsel, to her Parents. Now first pub- 
lished in order to cidtivate the Principles of Virtue and 
Religion in the Minds of the Youth of both Sexes. A 
Narrative which has its Foundation in Truth and Nature ; 
and at the same time that it agreeably entertains, by a 
Variety of curious and affecting Incidents, is intirely 
divested of all those Images, which, in too many Pieces cal- 
culated for Amusement only, tend to inflame the Minds 
they should instruct. Like many other books destined 
to popularity, Pamela seems to have found its public 
before the reviewers had time to recommend it. There 
is no notice of it in the December number of the 
Gentleman's Magazine ; but in the number for January 
1741 (where the model Letter-writer is reviewed), at 
the end of the Eegister of Books, comes the following 
announcement : — " Several Encomiums on a series of 
Familiar Letters, published but last Month, entitled 
Pamela or Virtue rewarded, came too late for this 
Magazine, and we believe there will be little Occasion 
for inserting them in our next; because a Second 
Edition will then come out to supply the Demands 
in the Country, it being judged in Town as great a 



ii.] PAMELA; OB, VIBTUE BEWABDED 31 

Sign of Want of Curiosity not to have read Pamela, 
as not to have seen the French and Italian Dancers." 1 
A second edition accordingly appeared in February, a 
third in March, a fourth in May, and the book was 
received on all sides with acclamation. At public 
places (Mrs. Barbauld says Banelagh, but in 1741 
Ranelagh was not in existence), fine ladies held 
Mr. Rivington's duodecimos up to one another to show 
they had got the work of which every one was 
talking. Dr. Benjamin Slocock of St. Saviour's, South- 
wark, who, apparently owing to a slip of Jeffrey's, has 
for many years been confused with Sherlock, openly 
recommended it from the pulpit ; Mr. Pope is reported 
to have said that it " would do more good than many 
volumes of sermons " (an utterance which may have 
been just as much intended to condemn the cloth as 
to praise Pamela) ; and finally, at Slough, where the 
local blacksmith read the story to the villagers by 
the forge fire, his audience was so transported by the 
eventual triumph and marriage of the heroine, that 
they insisted on ringing the church bells. The only 

iThe particular French Dancers intended were probably 
Mons. Desnoyers, the ridiculed of Hogarth, and the popular 
Mme. Chateauneuf, whose non-appearance early in 1740, after 
repeated announcement, brought about the wrecking of Drury 
Lane. The Italians were those favourites of Frederick, Prince 
of Wales, Signor and Signora Fausan, who, at this date, were 
delighting the same theatre with Les Jardiniers Sue'dois, Les 
Matelotes, Les Sabotiers, and other "comic dances" and 
ballets. These came between the Acts of the Play of the 
evening. Le Boitfon (sic), for example, was given, on 8th 
January 1741, after Act ii. of As You Like It. Richardson, 
perhaps, referred to these performances when, in the Familiar 
Letters, p. 236, he spoke of the Harlequinery which followed 
Hamlet. 



32 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

jarring note we have detected in the general applause 
is contained in an anonymous Lettre sur Pamela 
(Londres, 1742) prompted by Prevost's translation, 
and even this, a year later, confirms the extraordinary 
popularity of the book, which the writer styles the 
"meuble a la mode." " Personne" he says, "n'enparle 
avantageusement, mats tout le monde le lit." 

All this shows unmistakably that Pamela — to use 
a modern colloquialism — had " caught on." For this 
there were several reasons. In the first place, it had 
arrived in an exceptionally unfruitful period of English 
Literature. Of its own class, nothing had appeared 
in 1740 save TJie Unfortunate Princess of Mrs. Eliza 
Haywood ; while biography was represented by 
Gibber's Apology ; the drama by Lillo's Elmeric ; and 
poetry by such minor works as Somerville's Hobbinol, 
Dyer's Ruins of Rome, and that Deity of Samuel Boyse, 
which Fielding had commended in the Champion. 
None of these could be described as epoch-making 
productions. Then Pamela had the recommendation, 
notwithstanding a name borrowed from Sidney's 
Arcadia , of being absolutely unlike the " vast French 
Romances " of D'Urf e and that " grave and virtuous 
virgin," Madeleine de Scudery — romances over which 
the fine folks of George the Second were beginning to 
yawn unfeignedly. It gave the ultimate go-by to the 
stilt-and-buskin style of Cassandra, and Pharamond, 
and Cleopatra, and the Grand Cyrus ; and it shovelled 
ruthlessly into Ariosto's limbo all the mouthing 
Oroondates and Ambriomers and Ariobarsanes and 
other " most illustrious personages of both sexes," of 
whose " history, travels, and transactions " readers like 
honest Thomas Gent had been wont to hold ceaseless 



ii.] PAMELA; OR,VIBTUE BEWABDED 33 

discussion, and "find no end, in wand'ring mazes 
lost." 

Nor were these the only, or the most important, 
advantages of Kichardson's book. As the Slough 
incident shows, it appealed to the humbler reader as 
well as to the person of quality ; it bridged over the 
then more widely-trenched breach between rich and 
poor ; for who could say that a servant-girl who 
played her cards as cleverly as Pamela Andrews 
might not obtain a like reward ? Then its professed 
moral purpose — a new thing in a novel — was a further 
feature in its favour. A work of imagination which 
could be seriously commended from a city pulpit, 
might certainly be safely studied by many who would 
have scrupulously avoided "those Pieces calculated 
for Amusement only," to which its title-page made- 
shuddering reference. Published as it was " to culti- 
vate the Principles of Virtue and Eeligion in the 
Minds of the Youth of both Sexes," it might be read 
as securely as the Practice of Piety or the Whole Duty 
of Man, But more than these things, — more even 
than its unconventional freshness, its appearance in 
a " dead season " of letters, its appeal to a new 
audience, and its proclamation of a mission, — was the 
indisputable fact that it was itself a new thing. It 
dealt, not with people who had never lived and never 
could live; but with people who did live, and were 
then alive. It made them speak as they would have 
spoken, and what was more, it showed them thinking 
as they would have thought in their station of life. 
It entered into the minds of the characters described, 
and unsealed the springs of their laughter and their 
tears — especially of their tears. It was — we repeat 



34 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

— a new thing, destined, as its author foresaw, to 
inaugurate " a new Species of Writing," — the Novel 
of sentimental Analysis. 

To what extent, if at all, Richardson was indebted 
to preceding writers may be reserved for discussion 
at a later stage of this chapter. Turning now to 
Pamela itself, with full remembrance of the position 
claimed for it in the preceding paragraph, it is difficult 
to regard it in quite the same way as the readers of 
1740. We cannot take the same view of Pamela's 
Virtue, or Pamela's Reward. To our modern ideas, 
she is much too clever for an ingenue. She is only 
fifteen ; but she is as sharp as a needle. In her first 
letters, she quotes Hamlet, and she knows all about 
the story of Lucretia. What Eiehardson calls her 
" innocent stratagems to escape the snares laid for her 
virtue " have all the shrewdness of forethought, and 
from the first she has her eye on the main chance. 
We could perhaps forgive her for admiring her 
master; but, in the circumstances which ensue, it is 
impossible to forgive her for becoming his wife. No 
one has put this better than Mrs. Barbauld; and it 
is useless to go about in order to say what she has 
said sufficiently once for all. "The moral of this 
piece is more dubious than, in his life-time, the 
author's friends were willing to allow. So long as 
Pamela is solely occupied in schemes to escape from 
her persecutor, her virtuous resistance obtains our 
unqualified approbation; but from the moment she 
begins to entertain hopes of marrying him [a grada- 
tion, it may be noted parenthetically, which is drawn 
with extraordinary subtlety] we admire her guarded 
prudence, rather than her purity of mind. She has 



ii.] PAMELA; OB, VIBTUE BEWABDED 35 

an end in view, an interested end, and we can only 
consider her as the conscious possessor of a treasure, 
which she is wisely resolved not to part with but for 
its just price." In other words, when she reveals her- 
self definitely as the " young politician " which one 
of her satirists affirmed her to be, we are beyond the 
blandishments of her red and white, her round-eared 
caps, her russet gown, her really artless impulses and 
her genuine good qualities, as well as all the meekness, 
the humility, the charity, the piety, and so forth, which, 
at the conclusion of her story, her creator thought- 
fully invites us to admire. He further begs us to take 
note of " her grateful heart," which, as manifested in 
her extreme subservience to the " kind Gentleman," 
the " dear Master," who, having failed to ruin her, 
has, to gain his sensual ends, raised her by marriage 
to his own rank, produces a most unpleasant effect. 
But after all, it is Richardson himself who is most 
responsible for this, and we have no doubt that 
he knew her intimately. Still he professed to be 
drawing a pattern as well as a character, and his 
heroine only embodies his views of the fitting attitude 
to be observed in her peculiar circumstances. This 
being so, one sighs to think of the impetus which his 
unquestionable genius must have given to sickly senti- 
ment, sham delicacy, and, as regards deference to rank 
and riches, absolute snobbishness, by his admixture of 
those things in the composition of Pamela Andrews. 

Pamela is nevertheless the chief character of the 
story, — the most convincing, the best realised. Of the 
two Mr. B.'s, — for we cannot consent to regard them 
as one — Mr. B., the rake, comes out of the play-book; 
Mr. B., the reformed, out of the copy-book. Neither 



36 SAMUEL EICHARDSON [chap. 

of them can be said to be particularly interesting, or 
to be drawn from the life, although the author (as we 
shall see hereafter) professed to have some one in his 
eye. Lady Davers, his sister, again, is probably a 
fancy picture rather than a study. It is, of course, 
possible that a termagant of quality might behave as 
atrociously as she is made to do; and, according to 
Mrs. Barbauld, Eichardson found flatterers ready to 
assure him of the fidelity of the portrait. Mrs. Jervis, 
the Bedfordshire housekeeper, Mr. Longman, the stew- 
ard, and Pamela's parents, are all minutely depicted, but 
would be more interesting for a few humorous touches. 
Colbrand, the Swiss valet, and Mrs. Jewkes — Mrs. 
Jewkes, in particular — seem copied from Hogarth, 
and have a certain coarse vigour ; but those who 
care to see how much such presentments gain by a 
burlesque treatment will do well to contrast them with 
the Mrs. Slipslop and Parson Trulliber of Eichard- 
son' s rival. When we are told that Parson Trulliber's 
" Shadow ascended very near as far in height, when 
he lay on his Back, as when he stood on his Legs," we 
smile at an exaggeration which we are not expected to 
take literally ; when Eichardson tells us, in cold blood, 
through Pamela, that Mrs. Jewkes is as " thick as she 
is long," we feel that, in endeavouring to make wicked- 
ness ugly, probability has been violently strained. 
One of the notable characteristics of the book is its ab- 
sence of landscape. The lonely house in Lincolnshire, 
with its carp-pond and its elms and pines, and the 
Bedfordshire mansion, with its canal and fountain and 
cascade, under the pen of a modern, would have been 
as pretty as a background by Mr. Marcus Stone. But 
Pamela has little description of any kind, the exception 



ii.] PAMELA; OB, VIBTUE BE WARDED 37 

being that the author, like many another feminine man, 
seems to take a special pleasure in the catalogue of 
feminine costume, and can scarcely have omitted any 
detail, for example, of the "neat homespun Suit of 
Cloaths " which his heroine prepares when she is going 
home, nor of the silvered silk and diamonds in which 
she arrays herself when, after marriage, she repairs to 
the village church. It is in connection with the first 
that occurs one of those minute touches which show how 
carefully Eichardson had studied the sex. " Then," says 
the heroine, " I bought of a Pedlar, two pretty enough 
round-ear'd Caps, a little Straw Hat, and a Pair of knit 
Mittens, turned up with white Calicoe ; and two Pair of 
ordinary blue Worsted Hose, that make a smartish 
Appearance, with white Clocks, I'll assure you ; and 
two Yards of black Kibbon for my Shift Sleeves ; and 
to serve as a Necklace ; and when I had 'em all come 
home, I went and looked upon them once in two Hours, 
for two Days together" 

In the Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, Fielding refers 
to the "conduct of authors, who often fill a whole 
sheet with their own praises, to which they sometimes 
set their own real names, and sometimes a fictitious 
one." This is a palpable reference to Eichardson, who, 
in his character of Editor, prefixed to the first edition 
of Pamela, by way of Preface, a highly laudatory account 
of the contents of that work, supporting it by two 
equally laudatory letters to himself ; while in the 
second edition, he added an " Introduction " of twenty- 
four pages, made up from other flattering communica- 
tions which he had received in the interim. Even his 
friends, it is said, blamed him for this. One anony- 
mous clerical writer, whose protest is preserved at 



38 SAMUEL MCHAKDSON [chap. 

South Kensington, probably went far beyond the 
language of friendship. " You were bewitched/' he 
writes to John Osborn the bookseller, " to Print that 
bad stuff in the Introduction [to the second edition], 
for it has made enemies : As the Writer indeed calls us 
all Fools, and of coarse discernment, 'tis a Requital to 
your readers. He is too full of himself, and too gross 
in his Praises of the Author, tho' I confess he deserves 
much: but I believe has done himself no good in 
accepting of such greasy Compliments. He wou'd do 
well to alter it, and make it shorter." Eichardson's 
defence of the first " impudent Preface," as he himself 
styles it, is contained in the letter to Aaron Hill, from 
which we have already borrowed. Two of his female 
friends, he says, gave him prefaces for Pamela, which 
"were much too long and circumstantial," so he re- 
solved on writing one himself, " and knowing that the 
judgments of nine parts in ten of readers were but in 
hanging sleeves, struck a bold stroke in the preface 
you see, having the umbrage of the editor's character 
to screen myself behind. — And thus, Sir, all is out." 
Not entirely, for this explanation is scarcely satisfac- 
tory. At the same time, it must be remembered that 
Eichardson, as a printer, and compiler of "honest 
dedications," had probably a good deal of experience 
in the devious ways of prefaces, and may have con- 
ceived himself fully justified by precedent and practice 
to do as he had done. 

One of the results of the success of Pamela was the 
inevitable sequel. This, which was published by Ward 
and Chandler in September 1741, was entitled Pamelas 
Conduct in High Life. Like the subsequent continuation 
of Tom Jones, — Tom Jones in his Married State,— it is 



ii.] PAMELA; OB, VIBTUE BE WARDED 39 

without value, and deserves no consideration. But it 
had this effect, that it set Richardson upon continuing 
Pamela himself, which he accordingly did, producing, 
in the following December, two more volumes purport- 
ing to depict her "in her Exalted Condition," and 
announced as " by the Author of the two first." This 
step, although, as we shall see in our next chapter, it 
had some excuses of self-defence, could scarcely be 
described as well-advised. The interest of the first 
volumes had perceptibly declined with the heroine's 
marriage ; and to prolong the narrative without fresh 
complications was a manifest mistake. Richardson, 
moralist first and novelist afterwards, did not clearly 
perceive this. On the contrary, he put forth two dull 
and platitudinous tomes with a maximum of instruction 
and a minimum of incident, which Mrs. Barbauld justly 
characterises as " less a continuation than the author's 
defence of himself." Among other things, Pamela 
sends her letters and journals to the now reconciled 
Lady Davers, who examines them critically with the 
aid of a certain Lady Betty, while Mr. B. (whom the 
author is artist enough to exhibit as not wholly re- 
formed) gives a lengthy and " affecting relation" of his 
past misdeeds. This also is commented upon. Then 
Pamela herself turns censor, and examines Locke at 
length. She also records her sentiments upon Philips's 
Distrest Mother, and Steele's Tender Husband. Of all 
this, it would be possible for a robust historian to 
make rather cruel fun. But it is idle to ridicule what 
nobody now reads, and nobody read, even in Richard- 
son's time, except his flatterers. Indeed, it may be 
suspected that the third and fourth volumes of 
Pamela's authorised history are not unfrequently con- 



40 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

fused with the spurious volumes entitled Pamela's Con- 
duct in High Life. 

As to the moral intention of Pamela, there can be 
no manner of doubt. But even when Richardson 
wrote the book, there were those who held that he 
had not religiously kept the promise of his title-page ; 
and the excellent Dr. Watts, to whom he sent the 
first volumes, replied, in a letter which has disappeared 
from the South Kensington Collection, that " the ladies 
complain they cannot read them without blushing." 
M. Prevost, too, if we understand him aright, con- 
sidered it necessary in his translation to chasten or 
modify certain expressions which were calculated to 
wound the super-sensitive delicacy of French taste. 
On the other hand, the Eeverend Edward Mangin, 
Richardson's editor, who wrote an edifying Essay on 
Light Reading, in which he is severe upon the works of 
Fielding and Smollett, has nothing but praise for the 
author of Pamela. We live in a free country ; and the 
same diversity of opinion is exhibited in the critics of 
the nineteenth century. Mrs. Oliphant, who regarded 
the sensation novel as " a resurrection of nastiness," 
thinks that the letters of Pamela, for all their pretence 
of promoting the cause of religion and virtue, " abound 
in nauseous details as explicit as the frankest of French 
novels," while the late Mr. William Forsyth, Q.C., a 
scrupulous critic, if there was ever such, is of opinion 
that, with the exception of one or two scenes, " they 
contain little that need offend modern delicacy." So 
much for difference of view ! But upon this topic, it 
may be well to hear Richardson himself, who, in his 
third volume, puts his defence into the lips of Mr. B.'s 
sister, Lady Davers, Pamela is curious, nay, anxious, to 



ii.] PAMELA; OB, VIBTUE BEWABDED 41 

know whether the letters describing certain of the 
scenes of her life, and particularly those of " her two 
grand Trials," have been submitted to the gentlemen 
of Lady Davers's party. Lady Davers replies that 
they have been so submitted ; moreover, that she con- 
siders their recitals were necessary to the full intelli- 
gence of the story ; and finally, in words that are 
evidently intended for the gallery, that " it must be a 
very unvirtuous Mind, that can form any other Ideas 
from what you relate, than those of Terror and Pity 
for you. Your Expressions are too delicate to give 
the nicest Ear Offence, except at him [her brother, 
Mr. B.]. — You paint no Scenes, but such as make his 
Wickedness odious ; and that Gentleman, much more 
Lady, must have a very corrupt Heart, who could, from 
such Circumstances of Distress, make any Eeflections 
but what should be to your Honour, and in Abhorrence 
of such Actions." This is not a conclusive answer. 
The charge against Eichardson, if charge there be, is, 
not so much that he has unduly strained the limits of 
artistic presentment, but that, abnormally interested 
in certain forms of wrong-doing, he has, in his descrip- 
tions, sometimes exhibited a more prurient preoccupa- 
tion with undesirable details than is generally exhibited 
by a moralist. But his taste in this respect improved 
as he went on. As Mrs. Barbauld points out, his 
second novel is far less objectionable than Pamela, 
and his third not at all so. 

Where even admirers make difficulties, it is mani- 
fest that the adversary will find matter to his hand. 
The blemishes indicated by Dr. Watts were joyously 
seized upon by those who resented not only the 
teaching of Pamela, but the sanctimonious tone of its 



42 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

precepts. In a volume entitled The Virgin in Eden, 
and in another called Pamela Censured, opportunity was 
promptly taken, sincerely or insincerely, to show that 
the story, in spite of its pretensions, was not really 
calculated to assist the cause of virtue. A third effort, 
which purports to be from the pen of " Mr. Conny 
Keyber " (a thin disguise of Colley Cibber), was entitled 
An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews. In 
which, the many notorious Falshoods and Misrepresenta- 
tions of a Book called Pamela, are exposed and refuted; 
and all the matchless Arts of that young Politician, set in 
a just and true Light. The contents, which were further 
described as " Necessary to be had in all Families," may 
be inferred from the title. Parson Tickletext presents 
a copy of Pamela to Parson Oliver, as a new work 
which has been praised by the clergy, and may be safely 
given to his daughter or his servant. Parson Oliver, 
who happens to reside in Mrs. B.'s neighbourhood, 
rejoins by what he considers to be the true version of 
her history, which is accompanied by what professes 
to be her actual correspondence. This is both very 
clever, and exceedingly gross. Pamela is shown to 
be already hopelessly corrupt ; and what the title calls 
the " politician " element in her character is relentlessly 
exposed. Summing up, Parson Oliver describes the 
original Pamela as "a nonsensical ridiculous Book," 
which, so far from having "any moral Tendency," is 
"by no means innocent." He also considers, among 
other things, that it may have the effect, not only of 
making young gentlemen marry their servants, but of 
making servants desire to marry their masters, — the 
latter being, in effect, no more than the point raised by 
Scott in his admirable Lives of the Novelists. " It may 



ii.] PAMELA; OB, VIBTUE BEWABDED 43 

be questioned," says Sir Walter, " whether the example 
is not as well calculated to encourage a spirit of rash 
enterprise, as of virtuous resistance. ... It may occur 
to an humble maiden (and the case, we believe, is not 
hypothetical) that to merit Pamela's reward, she must 
go through Pamela's trials ; and that there can be no 
great harm in affording some encouragement to the 
assailant. We need not add how dangerous this 
experiment must be for both parties." 1 

A discussion has lately arisen as to the authorship 
of this Apology, which has attracted to it more atten- 
tion than it has hitherto received or deserves. Miss 
Thomson, who gives some account of the pamphlet is 
disposed to attribute it to Fielding; and following 
upon this, a writer who has recently prefaced a new 
edition of Kichardson's Works, speaks roundly of it as 
Fielding's " famous parody," which is certainly to beg 
the question. Miss Thomson's chief reason for con- 
necting the Apology with Fielding is, that, in Shamela, 
" Mr. B." is already transformed into Mr. Booby, the 
name given to him in Joseph Andrews. 2 There are also, 
besides the burlesque " Letters to the Editor " to which 

1 If we are to believe a review in the Gentleman* s Magazine 
for April 1754, the lesson of Pamela was not only learned but 
taught below-stairs. Among other things in the Servant's Sure 
Guide to Favour and Fortune of that year, it is recorded that 
John the coachman, by his discreet behaviour on the box, 
attracted the notice of two maiden sisters of great fortune, one 
of whom fell in love with him. Further, that John, "after 
enquiring her character of many noble families (the italics are 
ours), consented to her proposal of marriage, and became a 
great man." 

2 It may be noted that in some later editions of Pamela, an 
endeavour has been made to neutralise this outrage by revealing 
"Mr. B." as "Mr. Bootaby." 



44 SAMUEL EICHARDSON [chap. 

Miss Thomson refers, some minor touches which 
certainly suggest Fielding's hand. The Mrs. Jewkes 
of Shamela talks of her " Sect " like Mrs. Slipslop; * and 
Shamela' s own use of " Syllabub " for " Syllable/' and 
"Statue of Lamentations" for "Statute of Limitations/' 
is quite in the manner of that estimable Waiting 
Gentlewoman. It is curious, also, that a Parson Oliver 
(of Motcombe) had been Fielding's first tutor ; and that 
Dodd, the publisher of Shamela, had published books 
for Fielding. Finally, Eichardson himself, writing to 
"Mrs. Belfour" in 1749 (Corr. iv. 286), distinctly at- 
tributes Shamela to Fielding ; and, in collecting mate- 
rial for this memoir, we have found confirmation of this 
belief on his part. To a letter at South Kensington in 
which Shamela is mentioned, Eichardson has appended, 
in the tremulous script of his old age : — " Written by 
Mr. H. Fielding." All these things make for the 
Fielding authorship. On the other hand, Mrs. Bar- 
bauld is absolutely silent on the question; Arthur 
Murphy, who wrote Fielding's life, makes no reference 
to it; and, as far as we can remember, there is no 
mention of it in Fielding's works. If Fielding wrote 
it, he must have been glad to forget it ; and, in any 
case, the mere assertion of Eichardson, and even the 
coincidences noted above, do not, in the absence of 
further corroborative evidence, warrant any one in 
describing the book as Fielding's " famous parody." 

There is, however, one point in connection with 
Shamela, which, if it tends somewhat to strengthen the 
case against Fielding, appears also to indicate that he 

1 "Sect" for "sex" is, of course, as old as Falstaff. But 
the point here is, that it is used in a book by Fielding and a 
book which it is sought to attribute to Fielding. 



ii.] PAMELA; OB, VIBTUE BEWABDED 45 

did not associate the authorship of Pamela with 
Richardson. Referring to the " Composer " of that 
book, he makes Parson Oliver say : " Who that is, 
though you so earnestly require of me, I shall leave 
you to guess from the Ciceronian Eloquence, with which 
the Work abounds ; and that excellent Knack of making 
every Character amiable, which he lays his hands on " 
(p. 6). " I have seen a Piece of his Performance (says 
Parson Williams to Shamela), where the Person, 
whose Life was written, could he have risen from 
the Dead again, would not have even suspected he 
had been aimed at, unless by the Title of the Book, 
which was superscribed with his Name" (p. 52). 
These are certainly not obvious references to Rich- 
ardson. On the contrary, they seem rather to point 
obscurely to Cibber, with whom Fielding had a long- 
standing quarrel, and who, in his own Apology for his 
Life (published a year before), a work which Fielding 
attacked vigorously in the Champion, had described 
the author of Pasquin as " a broken Wit," a " Herculean 
Satyrist," and so forth, but without mentioning his 
name. And if Fielding really associated Colley Cibber 
with Pamela, it accounts in some measure for the 
association of Shamela' s Apology with " Conny Keyber" 
— a surname he had already applied to Cibber in the 
Author's Farce, ten years earlier. 

Shamela appeared in April 1741, just after the third 
edition of Pamela was issued; and it was not until 
February 1742 that Fielding put forth what has a 
better title to be described as his " famous parody," 
The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and 
his friend Mr. Abraham Adams. By this time he was 
certainly aware that Cibber was not the author of 



46 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

Pamela, since, in his first chapter, he speaks distinctly 
of the author of the life of Mr. Colley Cibber and 
the author of the life of Mrs. Pamela Andrews as 
different persons. Fortunately, no uncertainty of 
pedigree makes it needful to dwell here upon the 
story of the work with which Fielding inaugurated 
the Novel of Manners as opposed to the Novel of 
Analysis. Moreover, its connection with Eichardson 
is in reality but small. Apart from the " lewd and un- 
generous engraftment " (the words are Eichardson' s) 
which makes Fielding's hero Pamela's brother, and, 
it may be added, furnishes its least attractive scenes, 
Joseph Andreivs has not much to do with Pamela. When 
Parson Adams mades his appearance in Chapter iii. 
the author's original purpose begins to be forgotten, 
and after Chapter x. it is practically shelved, only 
to be recalled at the end of the book for the sake of 
coherence. To Pamela herself, the references are few. 
One usefully turns on the pronunciation of her name. 
" They had a Daughter," says a pedlar at the end 
of vol. ii., speaking of Goodman Andrews and his 
wife, "of a very strange Name, Pamela or Pamela; 
some pronounced it one way, and some the other." 
Sidney, from whose Arcadia Eichardson got it, made 
it Pamela, and so did Pope in the Epistle he wrote 
in 1712 to Teresa Blount : — 

" The Gods, to curse Pamela with her pray'rs, 
Gave the gilt Coach and dappled Flanders Mares." 

But Eichardson, in Pamela's hymns, made it Pamela, 
and his parasites persuaded him he was right. " Mr. 
Pope," wrote Aaron Hill, "has taught half the women 
in England to pronounce it wrong." Beyond the fact 



ii.] PAMELA; OB, VIE TUB BEWABDED 47 

that Parson Adams publicly rebuked Mr. and Mrs. 
Booby for laughing in church at Joseph's wedding, 
there are no further material references to Pamela, 
unless they can be held to be contained in Fielding's 
final words, which inform his readers that the hero 
will not be " prevailed on by any Booksellers, or their 
Authors, to make his Appearance in High-Life" 

Of other works prompted by Pamela, it is not 
needful to make mention here, although they seem to 
have been numerous. Richardson himself, in a foot- 
note to one of the South Kensington Mss., says : — 
" The Publication of the History of Pamela gave Birth 
to no less than 16 Pieces, as Bemarks, Imitations, 
Retailings of the Story, Pyracies, etc. etc." l But a 
brief word may be devoted to the adaptations for the 
stage. The first of these was Pamela, a comedy, played 
" gratis " in 1741 at Goodman's Fields. The author, 
one Dance, whose stage-name was James Love, was 
also an actor at Drury Lane. The piece had little 
merit ; but it is interesting, because a character inter- 
polated in it, that of a fop named Jack Smatter, was 

1 One of the imitations, probably not included in the sixteen 
was Pamela in Wax Work, showing that " Fortunate Maid 
from the Lady's first taking her to her Marriage; also Mr. 
B. her Lady's Son, and several Passages after; with the Hard- 
ships she suffer' d in Lincolnshire, where her Master sent her, 
and the grand Appearance they made when they came back 
to Bedfordshire : The whole containing above a hundred Figures 
in Miniature, richly dress'd, suitable to their Characters, in 
Rooms and Gardens, as the Circumstances require, adorn'd with 
Fruit and Flowers, as natural as if growing. Price Sixpence 
each" (Daily Advertiser, 23 April 1745). Richardson must have 
visited this artless exhibition, which was just at his door, being 
"at the Corner of Shoe-Lane, facing Salisbury-Court, Fleet- 
Street." 



48 SAMUEL KICHARDSON [chap. 

written and acted by " a Gentleman/' namely Garrick, 
then beginning his triumphant career. He also wrote 
the Prologue, which is included in his Poetical Works. 
Another version of Pamela was prepared for the stage, 
but never acted. In 1765 it again supplied the 
material of the Maid of the Mill, a Comic Opera, which 
had a considerable run, and was afterwards revived 
successfully with additions by O'Keeffe. The author 
was Isaac Bicker staff e. In Italy Pamela was turned 
into two plays, Pamela Nubile and Pamela Maritata. 
In France, Pamela; ou, La Vertu Mieux Eprouvee by 
Louis de Boissy, was acted at the Italiens in 1743; 
and, in the same year, Nivelle de la Chaussee also 
based a five-act play upon the book. La Deroute des 
Pamela, a one-act Comedy by Godard Daucour, after- 
wards a farmer-general, owes its origin to the same 
source. Finally, there is Voltaire's Nanine; ou, le 
Prejuge vaincu, a pleasant little three-act piece in verse 
suggested by Richardson through La Chaussee, and 
produced at the Comedie Franchise in 1749. 

On the other side of the Channel, as will be seen, 
Richardson's first novel was the cause of consider- 
able literary activity. It may therefore be well, in 
terminating this chapter, to touch briefly upon the 
recently-raised question of his alleged indebtedness 
to Marivaux' s Vie de Marianne. That there are super- 
ficial affinities between Richardson and Marivaux may 
at once be conceded. Both hit upon the novel of 
analysis ; and in this connection, no doubt, Marivaux 
precedes Richardson. Their manners of writing were 
also similar in some respects; and when Crebillon 
the younger, describing Marivaux, affirms that his 
characters not only say everything that they have 



ii.] PAMELA; OB, VIBTUE BEWABDED 49 

done, and everything that they have thought, but 
everything that they would have liked to think but 
did not, — he almost seems to be describing Richardson 
as well. But Marivaux's accomplished biographer, 
M. Gustave Larroumet, although admitting that there 
is no great similarity between the two heroines, goes 
much farther than this. Richardson, he affirms, " a 
lu la Vie de Marianne ; il en emprunte Videe et le 
caract&re principal." Elsewhere he writes, " tons les 
critiques du si&cle dernier sont unanimes : la Vie de 
Marianne a inspire Pamela et Clarisse Harlowe" Yet 
when we ask for the proofs, they are merely unsup- 
ported assertions. M. Larroumet does not even give 
them the honours of his text ; he puts them in a 
footnote. Diderot said so; President Henault said 
so; Grimm said so; Mme. du Boccage said that 
Marianne et le Paysan Parvenu were " peut-etre le 
module " of Richardson's novels. What, however, are 
the facts of the case ? The first part of the Vie de 
Marianne was published at Paris in 1731 ; the second 
part in 1734 ; the third part not until 1735 ; the 
fourth, fifth, and sixth parts in 1736 ; and the seventh 
and eighth parts in 1737. Nothing more came out 
until 1741, when the book was left unfinished. An 
English translation of the first four parts appeared 
at London in June 1736; a second instalment in 
January 1737; and a third in April 1742, when 
Pamela had been published for more than a year. 
There is not, as far as we are aware, a particle of 
evidence that Richardson ever saw the earlier volumes 
of this version. In fact, the only discoverable refer- 
ence he makes to Marivaux is contained in the post- 
script to Clarissa, and that occurs in a quotation from 



50 SAMUEL KICHAKDSON [chap. ii. 

a French critic (translated) taken from the Gentleman's 
Magazine for August 1749. That he knew no French 
is demonstrable, and he could not therefore have 
studied Marivaux in the original. Moreover, he was 
not in any sense a novel-reader ; and in Pamela, the idea 
of which had been in his mind twenty years before he 
wrote it, 1 he aimed at a moral work rather than a 
story. But what is still more to the point is, in the 
letter to Aaron Hill, quoted at the beginning of this 
chapter (to which M. Larroumet makes no reference), he 
has given so circumstantial and reasonable an account of 
the independent origin and development of the book, 
that it seems superfluous to go outside it in order to 
establish his obligation to a French author, however 
gifted, of whom, when he first sat down to write the 
Familiar Letters to which Pamela owed its birth, he 
had probably never even heard the name. 

1 See note 1 to p. 27. 



CHAPTER III 

CORRESPONDENCE, 1739-48 

The " Epistolary Correspondence" of Samuel Richard- 
son may fairly be described, in vulgar parlance, as " a 
very large order." What remains of it — for it is 
incomplete even now — consists of no fewer than six 
vast folio volumes, of which the aspect alone is 
sufficient to appall the stoutest explorer. These six 
volumes comprise some eight hundred and fifty letters, 
or transcripts of letters, from Richardson and his 
friends, beginning in 1735, and extending to the year 
of his death. They are generally written — at least 
Richardson's are generally written — in a small hand, 
on quarto paper; and as they are written on both 
sides, are, when necessary, " in-let." The effect of 
this arrangement, when they are mounted side by 
side, is frequently to give four pages of minute script 
to a single leaf of the volume in which they are 
contained. In an unpublished letter to Aaron Hill of 
29th Oct. 1746, Richardson gives his reason for thus 
packing his matter. " Did I not crowd my Lines into 
a little Compass of Paper, my Prolixity would seem 
more intolerable " — a device which he goes on to admit 
will not help him when his work reaches the press. 
As it is, he certainly contrives to get into a quarto 
page as many words as Swift could put into a corre- 

51 



52 SAMUEL KICHARDSON [chap. 

sponding page of the Journal to Stella. The difference 
is, that while Swift's line bristles with fact and illus- 
tration of the most various kind, Richardson's is often 
nothing but monotonous verbiage, and you may toil 
in the " immeasurable sand " of his sentences (one of 
his letters runs to five thousand words, which is a 
longish magazine article) without coming to anything 
which throws any light upon any aspect of his life or 
character with which you are not already sufficiently 
familiar. 

Copious as is this collection, it would have been 
larger still had its writer become famous earlier. But 
previously to the composition of Pamela, he does not 
seem to have kept copies of his letters ; and, as already 
stated, his correspondence with the gentleman who 
was " master of the epistolary style " had been long 
destroyed. Moreover, what must be regarded as the 
more interesting section of his letters belongs rather 
to the period which immediately preceded and followed 
the production of Clarissa, when he was in active com- 
munication with some of the cleverest and most 
stimulating of his lady admirers, — a period which 
belongs to a later chapter of this book. Mrs. Barbauld's 
account of the letters is as follows. During his declin- 
ing years, she tells us, Bichardson amused himself by 
selecting and arranging them, with a view to their 
eventual publication, either during his life-time or 
afterwards. They ultimately came into the possession 
of his daughter Anne, who survived (according to the 
Dictionary of National Biography) until December 
1803, when they passed to Richardson's grandchildren, 
who sold them to Mr. (afterwards Sir) Richard Phillips 
of 71 St. Paul's Churchyard, the compiler of A Million 



in.] CORRESPONDENCE, 1739-48 53 

of Facts, and the vegetarian publisher of Borrow's 
Lavengro. By Phillips, who is stated to have paid for 
them liberally, which must have been an unusual 
proceeding on his part, they were handed to Mrs. 
Barbauld to edit. In 1804 she published a selection 
from them in six volumes, preceded by a lengthy 
critical biography of consider ab]e value, which, for a 
long time, and rightly, has been the chief source of 
information concerning Eichardson. The original 
letters, which of course included a large number not 
printed by Mrs. Barbauld, were subsequently purchased 
by Mr. John Forster, by whom they were left, with 
his library, to the South Kensington Museum. But 
although, at the time of Mr. Forster' s purchase, the 
collection included much unprinted material, it does 
not, as it now exists, comprise all the examples which 
Mrs. Barbauld selected. Probably in the interval be- 
tween their ownership by Phillips and their ownership 
by Forster, letters were detached, and found their 
way into the hands of the autograph collector. 

For example, the seeker at South Kensington will 
look vainly for one of the most important letters of the 
series, — that in which, under date of 1753, Eichardson 
gave an account of his early life and career to Mr. 
Stinstra, the Dutch minister who translated Clarissa. 
From this Mrs. Barbauld makes copious extracts in her 
memoir ; but, because she has done so, does not reprint 
it with the rest of the Stinstra correspondence in her 
fifth volume. Consequently nothing remains of it but 
the passages she has quoted — passages so illuminative 
that one cannot but wish for the remainder. Then 
there is — or rather there is not — the letter from Dr. 
Watts complaining instead of complimenting in the 



54 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

matter of Pamela. This is duly enumerated in the 
little manuscript index which Eichardson had drawn 
up of the correspondence relative to that work ; but, 
although it is in the index, it is not included in the 
collection. There are several other gaps of a dis- 
appointing character. In one or two cases, however, 
the letter which has disappeared is printed by Mrs. 
Barbauld, so no harm is done, provided she printed it 
textually. Unhappily, after the old imperious fashion 
of the old-time editor, she seems to have excised freely, 
and many of the letters she has reproduced have been, 
in technical phrase, considerably "cut." 1 

Among the Pamela correspondence is one letter she 
has not reprinted, although it has obviously been 
manipulated by Eichardson with a view to publication. 
The light it throws on the circumstances which led to 
his ill-starred third and fourth volumes, is extremely 
interesting, besides illustrating very significantly some 
of the penalties of success in a thankless world. It is 
addressed to James Leake of Bath, Eichardson's 
brother-in-law, and bears date August 1741. If this 
date be correct, it must have been written before the 
appearance of the spurious sequel to Pamela entitled 
Pamela's Conduct in High Life, as that sequel came out 
in September. Advertisements of Pamela's Conduct 
had been published in the Champion; and Eichard- 
son, in response to a request for information, gives 
Mr. Leake " a short Account of the Affair." Having 



1 As an instance of this, Hill's letter to Richardson of 17th 
December 1740, which Richardson quotes in the introduction 
to the second edition of Pamela (see ante, p. 37), there makes 
three and a half closely printed pages. In Mrs. Barbauld (i. 
53), it barely makes two, widely set. 



in.] CORRESPONDENCE, 1739-48 55 

heard, he says, that Chandler, the bookseller, had com- 
missioned one Kelly, styling himself of the Temple 
(this was, most probably, John Kelly of the Universal 
Spectator), to continue Pamela, he remonstrated to one 
of Kelly's friends. This brought Chandler to him. 
Chandler alleged he had understood that Eichardson 
was not going to continue Pamela himself. Eichardson 
replied that he had certainly said so, though this was 
in the belief that no one " would offer to meddle with 
it, at least without consulting him ; " but that, if such 
an attempt were made, rather than his " Plan should 
be basely ravished out of his Hands/' and his charac- 
ters, in all probability, depreciated and degraded by 
those who knew nothing of the story, or of the delicacy 
required to continue it, he was resolved to complete it 
himself. He declared further that he should still 
decline to do this, unless he was forced to it in self- 
defence, but that if Messrs. Chandler and Kelly per- 
sisted in their enterprise, he must and would continue 
Pamela, advertising against them as soon as they 
published. 

Upon this, according to the narrative, Chandler had 
the effrontery to propose that Eichardson should 
combine forces with Kelly, and allow the combination 
to be published with his name, — a proposition which 
Eichardson of course rejected with the contempt it 
deserved. It was next suggested that what Kelly had 
already written (and been paid for) should be can- 
celled, and that Eichardson should continue the book 
for Chandler. To this Eichardson very properly 
replied that if he were forced to continue it at all, he 
would suffer no one else to be concerned, and he com- 
mented strongly upon the baseness of the procedure, 



56 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

and the " Hardship it was, that a Writer could not be 
permitted to end his own Work, when and how he 
pleased, without such scandalous Attempts of Ingraft- 
ing upon his Plan." 1 Upon this Chandler left him, 
apparently convinced of the error of his ways, and 
promising to consult his partner. He also promised 
to communicate further with Eichardson, which he did 
not do. Kelly, however, seems to have sent what he 
had written to the author of Pamela, in the fatuous 
expectation that he must, upon inspection, approve it. 
But Eichardson, as was only to be anticipated, found 
his purpose distorted and his personages caricatured. 

It is needless, at this point, to pursue the story 
with Eichardson' s own particularity; and we may 
here take leave to summarise. Messrs. Chandler and 
Kelly persisting, and moreover putting about the 
report that he was not the real author of Pamela, 
and could not therefore continue it, he thought him- 
self compelled, notwithstanding the objection he felt 
to second parts, and the mistake of pursuing a success 
until the buyers were tired out, to set about volumes 
three and four. He began towards the middle of 
April, when he had ascertained that the rival work 
was making rapid headway. His letter to Leake was 
written, as we have said, in August, when he was 
still busy with the work, and in recapitulating his 
difficulties, he incidentally sketches his plan, which he 
appears to have more fully thought out than one would 
imagine from some of his statements upon other occa- 
sions. " It is no easy Task, " he writes, " to one that 

1 This — it may be noted — was written previous to the "en- 
graftment " of Joseph Andrew s, which did not appear until 
February 1742. 



in.] CORRESPONDENCE, 1739-48 57 

has so much Business upon his Hands, and so many- 
Avocations of different Sorts, and whose old Com- 
plaints in the Nervous way require that he should 
sometimes run away from Business, and from himself, 
if he could. Then, Sir, to write up this Work as it 
ought, it is impossible it should be done in the Com- 
pass of one Volume. For her [Pamela's] Behaviour in 
Married Life, her Correspondencies with her new and 
more genteel Friends ; her Conversations at Table and 
elsewhere; her pregnant Circumstance, her Devotional 
and Charitable Employments; her Defence of some 
parts of her former Conduct; which will be objected 
to her by Lady Davers, in the Friendly Correspondence 
between them. Her Opinion of some of the genteeler 
Diversions when in London, as the Masquerade, Opera, 
Plays, etc. Her Notions of Education, her Friend- 
ships, her relative Duties, her Family Oeconomy, and 
20 other subjects as material ought to be touched 
upon; and if it be done in a common Narrative 
Manner, without those Beflexions and Observations 
which she intermingles in the New Manner attempted 
in the two first Volumes, it will be considered only as 
a dry Collection of Morals and Sermonising Instruc- 
tions that will be more beneficially to a Reader, found 
in other Authors; and must neither Entertain or 
Divert, as the former have done beyond my Expecta- 
tion." 

This quotation, if it does nothing else, shows clearly 
that Eichardson was more fully aware of the diffi- 
culties of the situation than might be imagined, and 
that he was no mean critic of his own efforts. As 
already related, Pamela's Conduct in High Life appeared 
in September 1741, and Richardson's continuation 



58 SAMUEL EICHARDSON [chap. 

followed in December. On the 17th November in 
the following year, he seems to have sent copies of 
the four volumes to Warburton, having heard that 
that great personage would be willing to assist him 
with advice. A transcript of his letter, hitherto 
unprinted, is in the "Forster Collection. It humbly 
invites Warburton' s corrections — "if in his unbending 
Hours, such a low Performance may obtain the "Favour 
of his Perusal" — in view of a future edition; and it 
refers to the praise with which the first two volumes 
had been honoured by "the first Genius of the Age," 
namely, Pope. Warburton replied in a friendly letter 
of the 28th December, in which he said that he and 
Pope, talking over the work "when the two last 
volumes came out," had "agreed, that one excellent 
subject of Pamela's letters in high life, would have 
been to have passed her judgment, on first stepping 
into it, on everything she saw there, just as simple 
nature (and no one ever touched nature to the quick, 
as it were, more surely and certainly than you) 
dictated." "The follies and extravagancies of high 
life" — he went on — "to one of Pamela's low station 
and good sense would have appeared as absurd and 
unaccountable as European polite vices and customs 
to an Indian ; " and he promised to develop his ideas 
more at large when they next met. Whether he ever 
did so, is not recorded. But seeing that Eichardson's 
continuation had been in existence for a twelvemonth, 
the suggestion was certainly a little behind-hand, even 
if Eichardson had possessed the humour and knowL 
edge of the world involved in such a virtual remodel- 
ling of his plan. It was his practice to solicit advice 
which, while it sometimes aided, oftener terribly 



in.] CORRESPONDENCE, 1739-48 59 

embarrassed him; and it is to be feared that this 
belated counsel of Pope and Warburton must be added 
to those other vexations which authorship brought 
upon a man already, as he told Mr. Leake, " oppressed 
with tremors." 

But if there were vexations, there were also com- 
pensations. One of the admirers of Pamela, whom 
Mrs. Barbauld calls " Mr. Chetwynd," but who, upon 
inspection of his letter at South Kensington, turns out 
to be Swift's friend, Knightly Chetwoode, writes to 
some one who had lent him the first two volumes, 
to record his opinion (which anticipates Diderot's) 
that, "if all the Books in England were to be burnt, 
this Book, next the Bible, ought to be preserved." 
Then there is a mysterious letter from six anonymous 
ladies of Beading (one of them was certainly a Mrs. 
Lancelet) who have read the two first volumes and 
the continuation with equal pleasure. They beg 
Richardson to tell them, on his honour, whether the 
story is " real or feigned." They " have sworn them- 
selves to Secrecy in this Affair." If the story be 
" feigned," they wish to know the name of the writer 
in order that their " Admiration may be turn'd upon 
the Author that could Paint y e Heinousness of Vice, 
and the Reward of Virtue, in such true Lights and 
Natural Colours." Richardson's matter-of-fact next- 
door neighbour, Mr. Vanderplank, to whom he must 
have shown this communication, seems to have 
doubted its genuineness. 1 Richardson's reply betrayed 

1 At the end of the joint letter comes: — " Lady Gains- 
borough and Lady Hazlerigg, we know, are exemplary Ladies, 
but can't find their Story in your Account." Mrs. Barbauld 
mentions that Pamela was popularly identified with both of 



60 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

a like distrust. It was copious, of course ; asked for 
particulars as to the names of his correspondents ; the 
nature of the oath by which they were bound, and so 
forth. He observed upon the improbability that six 
Ladies could keep a secret, and there, after a brief 
rejoinder from the ladies, the matter appears to have 
ended. Another of the miscellaneous pieces at South 
Kensington is a long voluntary contribution from the 
notorious " native of Formosa," George Psalmanazar, 
offered for insertion in the second part of Pamela, and 
detailing the charities of that lady to a poor family. 
It was " coarsely written," and was naturally rejected 
by Pamela's inventor. 

Among Kichardson's regular correspondents for the 
period covered by this chapter, the more important are 
Mrs. Pilkington, Dr. Young, and Aaron Hill. Of these, 
Hill is the earliest and most considerable ; but it will 
be courteous as well as convenient to take the lady 
first. Loetitia van Lewen — such was her maiden name 
— was the daughter of a man-midwife at Dublin, where 
she was born in 1700. At fifteen (Pamela's age), she 
was married to one Matthew Pilkington, a clergyman 
of literary tastes. Dr. Delany, who had been her 
father's college friend, introduced the young couple to 
Swift, who seems to have been interested in them, and 

these persons of quality, who were of humble origin; but she 
apparently attaches no importance to the rumour. It may 
be noted, however, that Richardson's family favoured the claim 
of Lady Gainsborough. "The master of Pamela," says Patty 
Richardson's husband, Mr. Bridgen, "was the father of the 
present Earl of Gainsborough, who rewarded the inflexible virtue 
of Elizabeth Chapman, his gamekeeper's daughter, by exalting 
her to the rank of Countess; an elevation which she adorned 
not less by her accomplishments than her virtues.' ' 



in.] CORKESPONDENCE, 1739-48 61 

particularly attracted by the vivacity and cleverness of 
the " poor little child/' who had been so prematurely 
wedded. He got a chaplainship for the husband, and 
introduced him to Pope and Gay, though he sub- 
sequently came to regard him (and rightly) as "a 
coxcomb and a knave." In June 1743, the date of 
Mrs. Pilkington's first printed letter to Richardson, 
Swift has lapsed into hopeless idiocy ; and she herself 
was living in King Street, Westminster, apart from her 
husband, and terribly straitened for means. In the 
second volume of her Memoirs (pp. 238-239) she gives 
an account of a visit she paid to Richardson at Salisbury 
Court. Not having, from her Irish experiences, asso- 
ciated a printer with anything very exalted, she had 
paid no special attention to her costume, beyond being 
tidy. But she was surprised by the grandeur of the 
house, and the benevolence of the master. " He not 
only made me breakfast, but also dine with him, and 
his agreeable Wife and Children. After Dinner he 
called me into his Study, and shewed me an Order 
he had received to pay me twelve Guineas, which he 
immediately took out of his Escrutore, and put it into 
my Hand ; but when I went to tell them over, I found 
I had fourteen, and supposing the Gentleman had made 
a Mistake, I was for returning two of them, but he, 
with a Sweetness and Modesty almost peculiar to 
himself, said, he hoped I would not take it ill, that he 
had presumed to add a Trifle to the Bounty of my 
Friend. I really was confounded, till, recollecting that 
I had read Pamela, and been told it was written 
by one Mr. Richardson, I asked him, whether he was 
not the Author of it? He said he was the Editor: I 
told him my Surprize was now over, as I found he had 



62 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

only given to the incomparable Pamela the Virtues of 
his own worthy Heart." 

From the references in her first letter to money 
advances made to her on behalf of Dr. Delany, and to 
the fact that Eichardson had " encreased her store by 
his own charity/' it would appear that this visit to 
him must have taken place previously to June 1743. 
From this time until her return to Ireland a few years 
later, she must have been a constant trial to Eichard- 
son. Her other friend was Colley Cibber, who seems 
to have been equally kind to her in spite of her 
vagaries. "Common sense/' he tells her in her ear, 
"is no contemptible creature, notwithstanding you 
have thought her too vulgar to be one of your maids 
of honour." To Eichardson she writes heart-rending 
epistles from all sorts of picturesque addresses, such as 
the "Blue Peruke, opposite Buckingham House, in the 
Strand," and her subscriptions have all the ingenious 
diversity of that equally impecunious epistolary artist, 
Mr. Wilkins Micawber. " Your ever obliged, and most 
truly acknowledging Servant, while this machine is 
Lcetitia " — is quite in the Micawber manner. Else- 
where the machine signs herself " Tristitia " ; and else- 
where again, not with a name but a quotation, or rather 
variation of one. " My name is lost, barebit, and gnawn, 
by Slander's canker tooth " — a letter ends. Quotations, 
chiefly from the play-books, abound in her communica- 
tion. " Whatever I have read I remember," she says 
upon one occasion, asking for Young's Night Tlwughts, 
which leads one to observe that, although she certainly 
does remember a great deal, she has not accurately 
recollected the quotation from King Lear to which 
reference has just been made. She is always in difn- 



in.] CORRESPONDENCE, 1739-48 63 

culties. Her daughter comes to her " big with child/' 
and her "saint-like methodist landlady" has turned 
them both into the street ; her " long-lost son," who 
must have been the John Carteret Pilkington, who 
edited the third volume of her Memoirs, arrives not 
long after. 1 Pending the procuring of employment for 
him on the stage, he is despatched to Richardson, who 
notes upon the maternal appeal : — " Eagged ; destitute. 
I gave him a suit of clothes. He gave particular 
orders to the tailor to make it fashionable to the 
height of the mode." The next we hear of him is 
that he is going (like George Primrose) " abroad with 
a young gentleman of fortune, the son of my most 
intimate friend in Ireland." His mother is got into 
" a pretty decent room, at three pounds a year, in 
Great White-lion-street, at the sign of the Dove, near 
the Seven Dials," from which address she proposes to 
issue a notification that "letters are written on any 
subject (except the law) by Loetitia Pilkington, price 
one Shilling. Also, petitions drawn at the same price." 
But this must have*failed, like the shops in the Strand 
and St. James's Street, and the " stampt paper hats," 
which she could not go on with because she had no 
materials, and had " only borrowed the stamps." " All 
my schemes are abortive," she says despairingly ; and 
it is no wonder she exhausted the patience of her 
friends. One of her funniest appeals to Eichardson is 
for " a few sheets of gilt paper, a few pens, and a stick 
of sealing-wax," in order that she may write begging 

1 In 1760 he published his own " real Story," which has an 
excellent portrait of his mother, mezzotinted by Richard Purcell 
after Nathaniel Hone. He is the hero of Goldsmith's white mice 
incident (European Magazine, xxiv. 259-60). 



64 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

letters to the nobility to raise enough to carry her 
back to what she elsewhere calls the "most unpin- 
darique climate " of Ireland. Her last epistle to 
Eichardson is dated 1749, and in the following year 
she died. 

From Young there are not very many letters during 
this period. Mrs. Pilkington probably asked Eichard- 
son for the loan of the Night Thoughts because he 
published them. " Suppose," says Young in one of 
his later letters, — " in the title page of the Night 
TJioughts, you should say — published by the author of 
Clarissa. This is a trick to put it into more hands ; I 
know it would have that effect." Young's communica- 
tions are not very lively, and are preoccupied with his 
health. He is eloquent to his correspondent — with 
whom he compares complaints, and discusses the 
baleful effects of the equinox — upon the virtues of 
the Welwyn Springs, of steel, of the tar- water whose 
cheering but not inebriating cup Bishop Berkeley had 
celebrated two years earlier in the book afterwards 
known as Siris. " Tar by winter, and steel by summer, 
are the two champions sent forth by Providence to 
encounter, and subdue the spleen." But note, as 
regards the tar, " it must be Norway tar, of a deep 
brown, and pretty thin " — says Mr. Prior, whose book 
on the same subject, at the date of this letter, had just 
been issued. From another of the letters, dated July 
1744, Young had been evidently visiting North End, 
and reading Miss Fielding. " I particularly insist that, 
when you go to North End, you let Cleopatra and 
Octavia know, that by their favour I was so happy, 
that in their company and so sweet a retirement, I 
thought, with Antony, the world well lost." Sarah 



in.] CORRESPONDENCE, 1739-48 65 

Fielding's Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia were not, how- 
ever, printed by subscription until 1757, when she was 
able in her " Introduction " to refer not only to the 
" rural Innocence " of her deceased brother's Joseph 
Andrews, but to the " inimitable Virtues of Sir Charles 
Grandisoyi." If Mrs. Barbauld be right in thinking 
that Young refers to Miss Fielding's book, he must 
therefore have read it in manuscript. Perhaps she was 
trying to get Kichardson to print it, — a task which was 
eventually performed for Millar, Dodsley, and Richard- 
son's brother-in-law, Leake of Bath. Richardson took 
several copies of the book, and seems to have procured 
other subscribers. 

It has been already said that Aaron Hill is the most 
voluminous of Richardson's correspondents at this 
date. There are no manuscript letters from Mrs. 
Pilkington and Dr. Young in the Forster Collection; 
but, on the other hand, there are a good many of Hill's 
besides those which Mrs. Barbauld has reproduced. 
Hill's first letter is dated 1730 ; but it is probable that 
this is a mistake, as the next letter is dated 1736. At 
this time he was a man of fifty-three, whose career had 
been sufficiently diversified. He had travelled; he 
had written a poor History of the Ottoman Empire; he 
had produced plays and poems ; he had managed a 
theatre ; he had projected many things, including the 
extracting of oil from beechnuts ; he had even antici- 
pated Oglethorpe in an attempt to colonise Georgia. 
His house was in Petty France, where he had a pleasant 
garden stretching to St. James's Park, and containing 
one of the grottos of the period, to which his letters 
make frequent reference. In 1738, soon after he began 
to correspond with Richardson, he retired to Plaistow 



66 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [cha*. 

in Essex, which, at that time, although flat and 
marshy, was a pleasant, rural village " with roomy old 
houses and large gardens," famous like Banstead Down 
for its mutton, and offering every prospect of quiet 
and seclusion. His wife, to whom he had been much 
attached, was dead, but he carried with him three 
daughters, rejoicing in the names of Minerva (other- 
wise Minny), Astraea, and Urania, the last afterwards 
married to a sublunary Mr. Johnson. Hill's chief 
object, besides literature, in retiring to Essex, was 
another of the projects of which he had not yet been 
cured. As early as 1718, he had written an essay on 
Grape Wines, and his latest idea was to establish 
viticulture in England. " I have been planting near a 
hundred thousand French vines," he writes, "with 
resolution next year to extend them over fifty acres of 
vineyard." It was not our climate, he held, but our 
skill, that was at fault, " both as to managing the vines 
in their growth, and their juice in its preparation." 
One of the first results of his operations was that he 
was promptly " surprised by an ague," and although 
the following year he sent Eichardson a bottle of his 
vintage, it must be concluded that the enterprise was 
not more successful than his earlier schemes. 

A few weeks afterwards, on December 8, 1740, 
Eichardson sent him the first two volumes of Pamela, 
for the acceptance of his daughters, but without 
revealing the authorship. Whether Hill had his 
suspicions, it is not easy to say ; but he wrote as if he 
had none. " Who could have dreamed he should find, 
under the modest disguise of a novel, all the soul of 
religion, good-breeding, discretion, good-nature, wit, 
fancy, fine thought, and morality ? I have done 



in.] CORRESPONDENCE, 1739-48 67 

nothing but read it to others, and hear others again 
read it to me, ever since it came into my hands ; and 
I find I am likely to do nothing else . . . because, if 
I lay the book down, it comes after me. When it has 
dwelt all day long upon the ear, it takes possession, all 
night, of the fancy. It has witchcraft in every page of 
it ; but it is the witchcraft of passion and meaning." 1 
Astrsea also wrote, for herself and Minerva, com- 
paring the advent of Pamela to a breeze through an 
orange grove. On the 22nd Eichardson replied, in a 
flutter of complacency, and, among other things, seems 
to have invited the corrections both of Hill and the 
young ladies. A good deal of Hill's next letter is 
occupied by an account of the effect of the book upon 
the precocious sensibilities of a six-year-old child 
named Harry Campbell, to whom the delighted author 
immediately forwards a present. Hill, however, was 
too shrewd, or too indolent to criticise his friend's 
style. He has endeavoured, he says, to go over it at 
one reading with the eye and the heart of a cynic, and 
at another with the vigilance of friendship, and has 
changed a word here and there. " Upon the word of 
a friend and a gentleman, I found it not possible to go 
farther, without defacing and unpardonably injuring 
beauties, which neither I, nor any man in the world, 
but their author, could supply, with others as sweet 
and as natural." As for Astraea and Minerva, they 
continue to be transported. After an effort to decoy 
Eichardson to Plaistow, the whole family visited 

lr The letter from which this is extracted was one of the 

" greasy Compliments " which Richardson included in the 

"Introduction" to his second edition. (See ante, p. 38, and 
p. 54 n.) 



68 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

Salisbury Court in July 1741, returning thence in a 
pleasant simmer of enthusiasm. In October, accord- 
ing to their father, the young ladies were in Surrey, 
still " preaching Pamela, and Pamela's author, with 
true apostolical attachment/' 

After this, there is a break in the correspondence 
of several months. Plaistow has turned out to be an 
"unlucky and ill-chosen place (most part of whose 
inhabitants we have seen buried)/' says Hill ; all the 
family have been laid up more or less seriously, and 
there are obscure references to domestic calamities. 
Eichardson is genuinely sympathetic, and presses them 
to try change of air at North End. But they seem to 
have been compelled to stay on at Plaistow ; and the 
further letters, until Clarissa is commenced, are mainly 
occupied with negotiations respecting Hill's poems and 
other productions, particularly the Fanciad, 1743, 
which at first, it appears, bore the extraordinary title 
of Go to bed, Tom. In some of these discussions, 
Eichardson reveals a greater antipathy to Pope than 
might be anticipated, considering the commendation 
which the "first Genius of the Age" had bestowed 
upon Pamela. It is true that this was no new thing. 
He had been imprudent enough, he says, some dozen 
years before, in speaking to one of Pope's friends (it 
wasHooke of the Roman History) to prefer Cooper 's Hill 
to Windsor Forest, Alexander's Feast to St. Cecilia's Day, 
and to express the opinion that Theobald was better 
qualified to edit Shakespeare than Pope, and though 
he had never known the latter poet personally, had 
reason to think he had offended him. He reverts to the 
subject in a later letter : — "I have bought Mr. Pope 
over so often, and his Dunciad so lately before his last 



in.] CORRESPONDENCE, 1739-48 69 

new-vampt one, that I am tir'd of the Extravagance ; 
and wonder every Body else is not. Especially, as 
now by this, he confesses that his Abuse of his first 
Hero, was for Abuse-sake, having no better Object for 
his Abuse. I admire Mr. Pope's Genius, and his Versi- 
fication : But forgive me, Sir, to say, I am scandalized 
for human Nature, and such Talents, sunk so low. Has 
he no Invention, Sir, to be better employed about? 
No Talents for worthier Subjects ? Must all be per- 
sonal Satire, or Imitation of others Temples of Fame, 
Alexander's Feasts, Cooper's Hills, Mac Flacknoes f Yet 
his Essay on Man convinces me that he can stand upon 
his own Legs. But what must then be the Strength of 
that Vanity and of that Ill-nature, that can sink such 
Talents in a Dunciad, and its Scriblerus-Prolegomena- 
Stuff?" 

HilPs reply to this letter, which concluded with 
another pressing invitation to North End, does not 
appear to have been preserved. But his chequered 
relations with Pope were now again interrupted. 
Years before, upon a misreport of something which 
Pope had said respecting his poem of the Northern 
Star, Hill had attacked Pope. Being assured by Pope, 
two years later, that he had been misinformed, Hill 
" repented " f ulsomely in a Preface to a poem entitled 
TJie Creation. But a subsequent reference to Hill in 
the Memoirs of Scriblerus, and a note in the Dunciad, 
reopened the quarrel, and Hill rejoined by a satire 
called the Progress of Wit, two lines of which — 
" Unborn to cherish, sneakingly approves ; 
And wants the soul to spread the worth he loves " — 

seem to have galled Pope considerably. But matters 
were again patched up, with the result that for some 



70 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

years to come a correspondence was maintained which 
must have been intolerably tedious to the greater man. 
It ceased in 1739 (when Hill retired to Plaistow), 
probably, as Mr. Courthope suggests, because Pope 
was " tired out with the length of his penance." 
Hill's last letter contains a reference to Richardson, 
whom he vindicates from any connection with the 
matter of the Gazetteers which issued from his press, — 
which matter at this date had given Pope much 
annoyance. " As to Mr. E[ichardson] himself, (among 
whose virtues I place it, that he knows and considers 
you rightly,) there should be nothing imputed to the 
printer, which is imposed for, not by him, on his 
papers, but was never imposed on his mind. I am 
very much mistaken in his character, or he is a plain- 
hearted, sensible, and good-natured honest man. I 
believe, when there is anything put in his presses, 
with a view to such infamous slander as that which 
you so justly despise, he himself is the only man 
wounded ; for I think there is an openness in his spirit, 
that would even repel the profits of his business, when 
they were to be the consequence of making war 
upon excellence." How far this ingenious exculpation 
proved consolatory to Pope we have no means of 
knowing, this letter from Hill, as already stated, 
closing their correspondence. But that the matter 
rankled in Pope's memory is clear from a passage in 
a letter to Lord Marchmont of the following year : — 
" The very gazetteer is more innocent and better bred 
[than ' our great men ']. When he abuses the brave 
or insults the dead he lays the fault another day upon 
his printer" And in the "new-vampt" Dunciad of 
1742, he inserted some lines which brought the 



in.] CORRESPONDENCE, 1739-48 71 

Gazetteers into the diving-match of the second book — 
the same diving-match, in fact, in which Hill ambigu- 
ously figures. According to Nichols, Eichardson only- 
printed the Daily Gazetteer for 1738, and as HilPs let- 
ter to Pope is dated February 1739, it is just possible 
that he may have " repelled the profit of his business " 
on account of the scandalous character of the paper. 

But whatever were HilPs feelings to Pope in Feb- 
ruary 1739, he must have revised them again by 
the time of his death. " Mr. Pope/' he writes, " as 
you [Eichardson] with equal keenness and propriety 
express it, is gone out. ... If anything was fine, or 
truly powerful, in Mr. Pope, it was chiefly centered 
in expression : and that rarely, when not grafted on 
some other writer's preconceptions. . . . He had a 
turn for verse, without a soul for poetry. He stuck 
himself into his subjects, and his muse partook his 
maladies ; which, with a kind of peevish and vindictive 
consciousness, maligned the healthy and the satisfied. 
. . . But rest his memory in peace ! It will very 
rarely be disturbed by that time he himself is ashes ! " 
There is more to the same effect, which shows Hill 
to have been but an indifferent prophet. From a 
later unpublished letter, he must have had the arro- 
gance to amend the Essay on Man, and send a copy 
of it to Eichardson, who (though he confesses to have 
read but six pages) is of course "amaz'd at the 
Obviousness as well as Justness, of the Correc- 
tions." He subsequently shows it to Mr. Speaker 
Onslow, who judiciously observed that he thought 
Mr. Hill undervalued his own Genius by giving the 
public anything of his, which was not entirely his, — 
a verdict which left Hill not wholly at ease. Another 



72 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

of Hill's new or revived projects at this time was 
a pamphlet entitled Critical Reflexions on Propriety in 
Writing : Separately regarding the Four Great Requisites 
of Plan, Thought, Figure, and Expression. Illustrated 
by a frankly selected Number of Compared Examples in 
the opposite Lights of Excellence and Error from the 
Works of Mr. Alexander Pope, and other Late and still- 
surviving celebrated English Authors. This pamphlet 
was intended to develop the opinions above expressed 
to .Richardson, particularly in regard to Mr. Pope's 
limitations, or, in Hill's words, " to leave it beyond 
Will & Testament's Evasion that Mr. Pope knew 
nothing, as to Plan and Thought, y* merited the 
name of Genius. In Figure and Expression, it has 
shewn, he had some Beauties, equal to the Best in the 
Best writers — And more Faults, and Lower, than 
many of the Worst among the Bad ones." Richardson 
had the manuscript, but it was not published. It is 
interesting, however, to note that a good many years 
earlier, at the time of his first reconciliation to Pope, 
Hill had meditated a somewhat different publication. 
" I have now," he tells Pope in January 1731, " almost 
finished ' An Essay on Propriety and Impropriety, in 
Design, Thought, and Expression, illustrated by 
examples, in both kinds, from the writings of Mr. 
Pope ' ; and, to convince you how much more pleasure 
it gives me, to distinguish your lights, than your 
shades, and that I am as willing as I ought to be, to 
see and acknowledge my faults, I am ready, with all 
my heart, to let it run thus, if it would otherwise 
create the least pain in you: — ( An Essay on Propri- 
ety and Impropriety, etc., illustrated by examples of 
the first from the writings of Mr. Pope, and of the last, 



in.] CORRESPONDENCE, 1739-48 73 

from those of the author.' " As Pope's editors observe, 
this was an offer Pope could not possibly accept. 
But as they also imply, it served to hang a future 
criticism, amiable or otherwise, as the case might 
demand, over Pope's head. Vain, and pompous, and 
fulsome as Hill was, he was nevertheless critic enough 
to say some very uncomfortable things ; and this alone 
is sufficient to account for the extraordinary tolerance 
which, for the next few years, Pope seems to have 
extended to him. 

Hill died in 1750, continuing to write to the end. 
The Fanciad being a failure, he made some further 
progress with an Epic, begun years before, and entitled 
Gideon; or, the Patriot. He also continued to project, 
— his last enterprise being the making of potash. But 
all his schemes, " crudely conceived " and " imperfectly 
executed," were, like Mrs. Pilkington's, abortive. He 
maintained his correspondence with Bichardson, who 
lent him money, and replied more or less effusively 
to his fluent flatteries. The most interesting of the 
remaining letters are those which relate to the forth- 
coming novel of Clarissa, concerning the progress of 
which, about 1744, we begin to hear particulars. 
Bichardson has sent Hill two specimen chapters. He 
is already nervously preoccupied with the possible 
length of the book, and begs Hill to shorten if he 
can. This Hill shrinks from doing, at first upon the 
reasonable ground that it is impossible to compress 
a part without seeing the whole, and then again upon 
the ground that it cannot be compressed without loss. 
"You have," he says in a passage which is, in some 
sort, an apology for Bichardson's manner, " formed 
a style, as much your property as our respect for 



74 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

what you write is, where verbosity becomes a virtue ; 
because, in pictures which you draw with such a 
skilful negligence, redundance but conveys resem- 
blance ; and to contract the strokes, would be to spoil 
the likeness." 

By July 1744 Eichardson has sent him the entire 
design or compendium of the story, with which Hill 
is in raptures. "It is impossible, after the wonders 
you have shown in Pamela, to question your infallible 
success in this new, natural, attempt." From the next 
sentence, it would seem that Richardson had already 
roughed out the book. "You must give me leave 
to be astonished, when you tell me that you have 
finished it already." By October 1746 it is certainly 
completed, for Eichardson, in a letter to Hill, has 
already been endeavouring to curtail its enormous 
bulk, and is sadly perplexed by a multitude of coun- 
sellors. A certain Dr. Hazlitt, who has read the whole 
to his wife in its longest form, is averse from parting 
with any limb of it or with any of the sentiments, 
and recommends him to do what the above-weight 
jockeys do at Newmarket, i.e. sweat whatever he takes 
away out of the whole. Mr. Cibber, on the other 
hand, who has also read it all, is for taking away 
entire branches, " some of which, however, he dislikes 
not." But these very branches Dr. Young will not 
have parted with; and Dr. Hazlitt and his Lady, 
" who is a Woman of fine Sense," say ditto to Dr. 
Young. So Eichardson, falling back upon a renewed 
offer of assistance which Hill has made, begs him to 
lend a hand in reducing the unmanageable mass, as 
the book is too long to send to press. 

The result might have been predicted. In a few 



in.] CORRESPONDENCE, 1739-48 75 

weeks Hill sent back seven letters upon which, he has 
worked, as a specimen of what he would do; and 
Eichardson is alarmed. He begs him, however, to go 
on with the volume he has, so that, manipulated by 
Hill, it may serve as a model for the rest. Hill's 
alterations would cut away two-thirds of the book, and 
reduce it to three or even two volumes, a compres- 
sion which is evidently more summary than he likes, 
as he doubts whether all he designed by it could be 
" answer' d in so short a compass without taking from 
it those simple, tho' diffuse Parts, which some like, and 
have (however unduly) complimented him upon, as 
making a new Species of Writing/' " I am sure, Sir," 
he goes on, " you will not be displeased with me, if I 
rather alter by you, than verbally copy from you ; and 
this the rather, as there are some Passages and De- 
scriptions omitted, which have been approved by 
Persons of Judgment, who would be disappointed, if 
ever it be published, not to find them." From all 
this it is plain that Eichardson would have preferred 
not to accept Hill's version, but simply to use his 
work as suggestions for alteration by himself ; and it 
is not perhaps surprising to find, by his next letter, 
that Hill has abandoned so thankless and laborious a 
task. It may be suspected that Eichardson himself 
was not really sorry. "What contentions, what dis- 
putes have I involved myself in with my poor Clarissa," 
he writes to Young in November 1747, "through my 
own diffidence, and for want of a will ! I wish I had 
never consulted anybody but Dr. Young, who so 
kindly vouchsafed me his ear, and sometimes his 
opinion." Young was probably one of his best critics ; 
and it was to Young that he made the significant 



76 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

admission that he (Eichardson) was "such a sorry 
pruner . . . that he was apt to add three pages for 
one he took away." 

There are other references to Clarissa, both in the 
Hill correspondence, and the letters of Young and 
Mrs. Pilkington. But it will be most convenient to 
reserve these for the next chapter ; and to conclude 
this one with a few biographical particulars. Between 
1740 and 1748 nothing of moment seems to have 
happened to Eichardson. In 1740 he printed " at the 
Expence of the Society for the Encouragement of 
Learning/' of which mention has already been made, 
the first (and only published) volume of Tlie Negotiations 
of Sir Thomas Roe in his Embassy to the Ottoman Porte, 
from the year 1621 to 1628 inclusive. Eichardson not 
only edited and prefaced this huge folio of over eight 
hundred pages; but he summarised its contents in a 
way that should surely entitle him to Goldsmith's 
praise of being "a dab at an index." His analysis 
occupies sixty double column folio pages, and each 
letter is abridged with a dexterity that would do 
honour to a Foreign Office precis writer. Hill, acknowl- 
edging a present of the great tome, says that he had 
discovered, with astonishment, that the " comprehen- 
sive and excellent index of heads had drawn every- 
thing out of the body " of the book ; and for once his 
ready eulogy is not undeserved. Another work, also 
characterised by an elaborate index, is JEsop's Fables, 
with " Copper Cuts " and morals and reflections adapted 
from Sir Eoger L'Estrange. As Eichardson seems to 
have sent a copy of this to Harry Campbell, the little 
boy who had been so affected by Pamela, and as he 
specially refers to it in a footnote to Chapter xxix. of 



in.] CORRESPONDENCE, 1739-48 77 

that book, where he quotes the fable of the Ants and 
the Grasshopper, there can be little doubt that the 
reforming and selecting of the fables, as he styles it, 
was done by himself. Two years later, in 1742, he 
issued in four vols, a new edition of Defoe's Tour 
through Great Britain, " The Third Edition. With very 
great Additions, Improvements, and Corrections." Of 
the books (in addition to Roe) printed by him during 
this period ; and indeed of all the works printed by 
him (in addition to his own), not much is known. A 
collective edition of Young's Night Thoughts in two vols, 
certainly came from his press in 1749 ; and in 1757-58 
he undoubtedly printed Mrs. Carter's translation of 
Epictetus. 1 He is also credited, in 1732, with a folio 
of Churchill's Collection of Voyages, and in 1739 with 
Maitland's London. But the triumph of the Richard- 
sonian types must assuredly have been his part in the 
wonderful seven folio volumes of De Thou's Historia sui 
Temporis, 1733, by Buckley, than which, says Dibdin, 
no " finer edition of a valuable historian has ever seen 
the light." The book had several printers ; but at the 
end of vol. ii. is "Londini: Imprimebat Samuel 
Richardson." 

1 " I do not think Mr. Richardson near so well this winter as 
he was last. Romances agree better with him than philosophy 
[i.e. the printing of Epictetus]." (Miss Talbot to Miss Carter, 
20th December 1757.) 



CHAPTER IV 

CLARISSA; OR, THE HISTORY OF A YOUFG LADY 

The dwarf -artist, Loggan, to whom we owe so many 
interesting sketches of the watering-places of the 
Eighteenth Century, has left one which usefully 
illustrates the life-story of Richardson at this period. 
The scene is The Pantiles at Tunbridge Wells, in the 
month of August 1748, when the public were supposed 
to be eagerly expecting the remainder of Clarissa, a 
second instalment of which had appeared in the pre- 
ceding April. The open space in front of the Post 
Office is crowded with notabilities, whose names, accord- 
ing to the copy of the drawing given by Mrs. Barbauld 
in her third volume, Richardson himself has been 
obliging enough to insert below in his own hand- 
writing. Sailing up the centre in white, with an 
immense side-hoop, is Miss Elizabeth Chudleigh, 
" Maid of Honour to Her Royal Highness the Princess 
of Wales," and not yet the bigamous Duchess of 
Kingston and Bristol, though already married privately 
to Augustus Hervey. On her left is Mr. Richard 
Nash, Master of the Ceremonies at Bath; to her 
right, Mr Pitt, afterwards Earl of Chatham. In the 
middle foreground is a group including the Duchess 
of Norfolk, Lady Lincoln, Miss Peggy Banks, a " pro- 
fessional Beauty," who afterwards married Lord 

78 



chap, iv.] CLABISSA 79 

Temple's brother, Henry Grenville, Mr. Speaker 
Onslow, Lord Powis, and Chesterfield's " respectable 
Hottentot/' George Lyttelton. Garrick, a diminutive 
personage, is chatting with the famous prima-donna, 
Giulia Frasi ; Colley Cibber is following, like a led- 
captain, at the heels of Lord Harcourt; a Doctor 
Johnson, whom Dr. Birkbeck Hill will not have to be 
the Doctor Johnson, is conversing deferentially with 
the Bishop of Salisbury, while Whiston of Josephus 
and the bombs — 

" (The longitude uncertain roams, 
In spite of Whiston and his bombs) " — 

together with the wives of some of those named, makes 
up the company. In the extreme left-hand corner is 
Loggan himself, talking to the woman of the Wells; 
and hastening out of the picture to the right, not far 
behind Whiston, is a compact little figure in a gray 
coat, grasping a stout cane in its right hand, and 
having the other buried in its bosom, whose identity is 
discreetly veiled in the reference as " Anonym." This 
is Mr. Samuel Eichardson, of Salisbury Court, Fleet 
Street, and North End, Hammersmith, the celebrated 
author of Clarissa. 

By great good luck, in a letter dated 2nd August 
1748, — this very time, — Eichardson has given a pen- 
sketch of himself which agreeably supplements Loggan' s 
little portrait. It is addressed to his young friend, 
Miss Susannah Highmore, endeavouring to persuade 
her to come to Tunbridge Wells. After describing 
her " other old lover," Colley Cibber, as still " hunting 
after new faces," and referring to the dialogue sub- 
sequently published as The lady's lecture, which Colley 



80 SAMUEL KICHARDSON [chap. 

has just written, he proceeds " to show her a still 
more grotesque figure," — himself. " A sly sinner, 
creeping along the very edges of the walks, getting 
behind benches : one hand in his bosom, the other 
held up to his chin, as if to keep it in its place : afraid 
of being seen, as a thief of detection. The people of 
fashion, if he happen to cross a walk (which he always 
does with precipitation) unsiniling their faces, as if they 
thought him in their way; and he as sensible of so 
being, stealing in and out of the bookseller's shop, as 
if he had one of their glass-cases under his coat. Come 
and see this odd figure ! You never will see him, 
unless / show him to you : and who knows when an 
opportunity for that may happen again at Tunbridge ? " 
From another letter printed by Mrs. Barbauld, and 
addressed to his adopted daughter, Miss Westcomb, 
we get him in another mood. There is no date to this, 
but it was evidently written from Tunbridge Wells at 
this time, since it refers to Gibber's already mentioned 
dialogue as written, but not printed. 1 The waters 
have done him no good as yet, he tells Miss West- 
comb ; and since dizziness was apparently one of their 
results, one wonders how they could possibly have 
benefited a sufferer from vertigo. His nerves are 
no better; and the manners of the Wells were not 
attractive to a moralist, — especially to a moralist, 
however susceptible to feminine charm, who had rigor- 
ous views on conjugal claims and parental authority. 

1 It was published later in the year, in December, at the 
same time as the concluding volumes of Clarissa, and was en- 
titled The lady's lecture. A theatrical dialogue between Sir 
Charles Easy and his marriageable daughter. By C. Cibber, Esq. 
London, 1748, pr. Is. 



iv.] CLABISSA 81 

There were very few pretty girls, he declared; and 
the married ladies behaved as if they were single. 
" Women are not what they were," says this observer. 
He did not join in the worship of the reigning Beauties, 
Miss Banks, Miss L. of Hackney, Miss Chudleigh, 
though of the last he speaks more tolerantly than 
most historians; and he makes mild fun of septua- 
genarian fribbles like Cibber who think themselves 
happy " if they can obtain the notice and familiarity 
of a fine woman." Once he finds the laureate " squatted 
on one of the benches, with a face more wrinkled than 
ordinary with disappointment. '1 thought/ said I, 
i you were of the party at the tea-treats — Miss Chud- 
leigh is gone into the tea-room.' — ' Pshaw ! ' said he, 
( there is no coming at her, she is so surrounded by 
the toupets? 1 — And I left him upon the fret. — But he 
was called to soon after ; and in he flew, and his face 
shone again, and looked smooth." 

In August 1748 Richardson was nearing sixty, and 
as the foregoing references to his health show plainly, 
a confirmed valetudinarian, suffering from some real 
and many fancied disorders promoted by his literary 
labours, and originating in the close application of a 
sedentary life. He had long been a vegetarian and 
water-drinker, and his health was probably not im- 
proved by the bleeding, etc., to which at certain 
periods of the year he was subjected by the barbarous 

1 Toupet was a famous wig-maker. Cf. Brainstem's Art of 
Politicks, 1729, p. 10 : — 

" Think we that modern Words eternal are ? 
Toupet, and Tompion, Cosins, and Colmar 
Hereafter will be call'd by some plain Man, 
A Wig, a Watch, a Pair of Stays, a Fan." 

G 



82 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

medical treatment of the day. He was liable to vague 
" startings " and " paroxysms." Crowds of any kind 
he could not endure, for which reason lie had left off 
going to church. His chief mode of exercise was walk- 
ing, as he had never learned to ride except upon 
the obsolete chamber-horse, a thorough-paced but 
unprogressive form of equitation, which, at best, is 
but a poor substitute for the saddle. Some of his 
letters would be ludicrous, were it not for their pitiable 
exhibition of nervous prostration. He tells Hill that 
he has been reading his unpublished Treatise upon 
Acting. But he feels his whole frame so affected and 
shaken by that author's " wonderful Description of the 
Force of Acting, in the Passions of Joy, Sorrow, Fear, 
Anger, etc./' that his frequent " Tremors and Start- 
ings" oblige him to suspend the perusal until by a 
course of a newly tried " Oak Tincture " (recommended 
by his correspondent) he can fortify his "relaxed, 
unmuscled Muscles," and brace his " unbraced Nerves." 
Had he known anything of Horace, he might, with 
perfect fitness, have applied to Hill at this juncture 
that falsis terroribus implet, with which, in the Jacobite *s 
Journal, the author of Joseph Andrews afterwards 
complimented the moving author of Clarissa. 

To Clarissa we now come. It is sometimes stated 
that the first four volumes were published in 1747, 
and the last four in 1748. Other authorities, on the 
contrary, suppose the book to have been wholly issued 
in 1748, i.e. four volumes in the spring, and four 
in the autumn. The mode of publication was 
peculiar, and neither of these accounts is accurate. 
There were in fact, in the first edition, not eight 
volumes, but seven. "I take the Liberty to join the 



it.] CLABISSA 83 

4 Vols, you have of Clarissa, by two more," says 
Richardson to Hill in an unpublished letter of 7th 
November 1748. " The Whole will make Seven ; 
that is, one more to attend these two. Eight 
crouded into Seven, by a smaller Type. Ashamed as 
I am of the Prolixity, I thought I owed the Public 
Eight Vols, in Quantity for the Price of Seven"; and 
he adds a later footnote to explain that the 12mo book 
"was at first published in Seven Vols, [and] Afterwards 
by deferred Restorations, made Eight as now." These 
"deferred Restorations" were first effected in the 
fourth, or larger print edition of 1751, the Preface 
to which says — "It is proper to observe with regard 
to the present Edition that it has been thought fit to 
restore many Passages, and several Letters which were 
omitted in the former merely for shortening-sake." x 
Of the seven volumes constituting the first edition, 
two were issued in November 1747 ; two more in 
April 1748 (making "the 4 Vols, you have," above 
referred to) ; and the remaining three, which, accord- 
ing to Mr. Urban' s advertisement, "compleats the 
whole," in December 1748. This is confirmed in 
January 1749, by one of Richardson's correspondents, 
" Mrs. Belf our," who, on the 11th of that month, has 
read the last three volumes. These dates are of 
interest as showing how great a strain Richardson 
put upon his readers. What may be called the crucial 

1 Johnson, to whom Richardson had apparently sent a copy 
of the edition of 1751, replies (9 Mar.), "I was . . . glad to 
find that she [Clarissa] was now got above all fears of prolixity 
and confident enough of success to supply whatever had been 
hitherto suppressed. I never indeed found a hint of any such 
defalcation, but I regretted it ; for though the story is long, 
every letter is short." 



84 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

catastrophe does not take place until volume the fifth, 
so that they had to wait from April to December 1748 
for those portions of the story to which the first four 
volumes had been but the leisurely and very deliberate 
introduction. 

The student of to-day labours under no such dis- 
ability ; and provided he possesses the requisite 
stamina, may, to use the figure of Colley Cibber, read 
to the finish "without drawing bit." The book, to 
quote further from the title-page, comprehends " The 
most Important Concerns of Private Life." And 
particularly it shows " The Distresses that may attend 
the Misconduct Both of Parents and Children in 
Eelation to Marriage " — a sentence which might also 
describe both TJie JSfewcomes and Aylmefs Field. The 
story, which, notwithstanding its inordinate length, 
only occupies a period of eleven months, may be sum- 
marised as follows : — Miss Clarissa Harlowe, "a young 
Lady of Great Beauty and Merit " (we shall, as far as 
possible, employ Richardson's own description in his 
list of principal persons) has the misfortune not only 
to belong to an opulent family who are eaten up by 
love of money, but to have inherited as her own 
exclusive property the estate of her paternal grand- 
father. This gratuitous advantage exposes her to the 
bitter jealousy of her brother, James, and her elder 
sister, Arabella. Arabella is not beautiful ; and her 
animosity to her sister is intensified by the fact that 
a certain brilliant and fascinating Robert Lovelace, 
who has been introduced into the family as her 
own suitor, so contrives matters as to transfer his 
attentions to her more attractive younger sister. 
Thereupon, Clarissa's two uncles, Antony and John, 



iv.] CLABISSA 85 

announce their intention of leaving money to Clarissa 
with the object of creating a family, — Lovelace also 
being a person of means. The effect of all this is to 
increase the hatred to Clarissa of her brother and 
sister, who determine to bring her alliance with Love- 
lace to naught. Another suitor, one Eoger Solmes, 
an extremely contemptible and disagreeable candidate, 
is brought forward, and presently the whole family is 
drawn into a league against the heroine. Difficulties 
are increased by a duel between Lovelace and the 
brother, James Harlowe. Clarissa does not admire 
Lovelace, whose past reputation is repugnant to her ; 
but the inarch of circumstances, and the persistent 
way in which, both by himself and by her family, 
he is kept before her mind, gradually result in her 
taking — to say the least — an interest in him. Under 
the apprehension that she will be forced into an 
alliance with the hateful Solmes, she is induced to 
accept Lovelace's offer of protection, and, half-terrified 
and half -consenting, is carried off by him. Some of 
the author's correspondents ventured to designate 
this " a rash elopement " — a term to which he greatly 
objected, since he had only intended to imply that 
his heroine " was trick' d by Lovelace into his power 
against her intention." 1 But, having taken this step, 
Lovelace's purpose undergoes a change ; and however 
honourable his intentions may have been in the past, 
they now no longer tend in the direction of marriage. 
His desire is only to gratify his inordinate vanity of 
conquest, and to add Clarissa to the list of its victims. 
Entangled henceforth in an inextricable network of 
lies, intrigue, and deception, the poor girl, alienated 

1 " Advertisement " to Clarissa's Meditations, etc., 1750, iii. 



86 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

from her friends, and unsuspecting in her own good- 
ness and purity, is decoyed into the company of some 
of the most worthless of her sex, and finally betrayed 
while under the influence of opiates. After various 
experiences in a spunging-house, and different hiding- 
places, she finally settles down, broken-hearted, to die. 
Her relations reject her; and though Lovelace, in his 
intermittent moments of remorse, is willing to marry 
her, her pride and inherent nobility of character make 
such a solution out of the question. Serene in the con- 
sciousness of her innocence, " unviolated (as she says) 
in her will," but mortally wounded, Clarissa gradually 
fades away, and finally dies, leaving her suddenly- 
awakened relatives distracted by remorse for her fa,te, 
while Lovelace, who has richly deserved the gallows, 
is compassionately killed in a duel by her cousin and 
guardian, Colonel William Morden. 

Such is the outline of this, in some respects re- 
pulsive, but in all respects remarkable, novel. That 
it should have been conceived by a middle-aged, 
middle-class printer, whose first essay had been the 
vulgar glorification of opportunism; — that the por- 
trayer of the petty-souled Pamela should have pre- 
ceded the creator of the " divine Clarissa," as it was 
once the custom of her admirers to style her — are 
problems to which it is idle to seek a solution. But 
the fact remains, that, in his second heroine, Eichard- 
son has drawn one of the noblest of women; and 
that, notwithstanding his pretence of "no plan," 
he has constructed a story which, from beginning 
to end, keeps her constantly before the reader in 
the most skilful manner ; disposes the subordinate 
characters about her with the nicest discrimination; 



iv.] CLABISSA 87 

and, in spite of an inveterate and constitutional 
diffuseness, manages to steer almost entirely clear of 
really irrelevant episode and digression. One smiles 
a little, and excusably, at certain traits in Clarissa's 
picture; at the details (probably studied from the 
Locke upon whom Pamela discourses so complacently) 
of her proficiency in "the four principal rules of arith- 
metic," at her knowledge of French, Italian, and the 
classics (in translations), at her systematic distribution 
of her time between music, drawing, and needlework, 
with its special allowance for sleep, meals, the visits of 
the clergy, and ministrations to the poor, for all these 
excellent qualities were indispensable to the stock-in- 
trade of the author's ideal woman, as he desired to 
exhibit her. But what he did not find in Locke and 
the rest was her better part, her purity and gentle- 
ness, her intellectual elevation, her dignity in distress, 
her resolute rectitude, her invincible determination 
not to stray one inch from her duty as she conceived 
it. This it is which makes the wonder of her being, — 
the marvel of her existence. " No Greek, no Italian, no 
English poet " — says Mrs. Oliphant, herself a novelist 
and a critic — " has painted such a figure in the great 
picture-gallery which is common to the world." We 
may continue the quotation, which is hard to better. 
" Neither ancient nor modern woman has ever stood 
before us thus pale and splendid in the shame which is 
not hers." . . . "Almost every other victim shrinks 
and burns with the stain of her own fault ; and even 
Lucretia herself, if more awful, is less womanly, less 
tender, less sweet, than the maiden creature in whom 
nature and religion reassert their right after the first 
moment of frenzy ; who calls for no vengeance, and 



88 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

can accept no expiation, and dies smiling, of no ex- 
ternal wound, but only by the deadly puncture of the 
shame itself, making all other daggers unnecessary." 
. . . "Not Desdemona, not Imogen, is of herself a 
more tender creation. They are so much the. more 
fortunate that it is immortal verse that clothes them. 
Clarissa, for her part, has but a garrulous and pottering 
expositor, but in her own person she is divine." 

For the betrayer of such a character, we can- 
not pretend to feel the interest which he inspired in 
many of Bichardson's contemporaries, and still, as it 
seems, continues to inspire in certain modern critics. 
He is much more constructed, or rather concocted, 
than is Clarissa. He has to be witty, to be handsome, 
to be daring, to be impudent and fascinating, to be 
cold-blooded, to be supremely selfish and vain and 
egotistical, not because Eichardson had found these 
qualities combined in one individual, but because they 
are indispensable to the complex hero of his fable. 
He must have been a rake, because a rake can always 
be reformed; he must not be an infidel, because an 
infidel would have frightened Clarissa away at once. 
But Eichardson, strange to say, although he had no 
model for his heroine, save in his own " study of 
imagination," pretends to have known some shadowy 
prototype or prototypes of Eobert Lovelace. Defend- 
ing his delineation, in a letter to Hill of January 26, 
1747, he says, " I must own, that I am a good deal 
warped by the Character of a Gentleman I had in 
my Eye, when I drew both him, and Mr. B. in 
Pamela. The best of him for the latter; the worst 
of him for Lovelace, made still worse by mingling 
the worst of two other Characters, that were as well 



iv.] CLABISSA 89 

known to me, of that Gentleman's Acquaintance. 
And this made me say in my last, that I aimed 
at an uncommon, altho' I supposed, a not quite 
unnatural Character." What he had said in his last, 
however, was not so conclusive. "I intend in him 
[Lovelace] a new Character, not confined to usual 
Rules : And something indeed New in each, or I should 
not have presumed to scribble. . . . But this I must say, 
that I had not in my Aim [?] to write, after anything 
I ever read, or heard talk'd of ; tho' I had in my eye 
something that I had seen years ago." It is, of course, 
possible, that the reference here may be to Wharton 
(though Wharton seems to be a most unlikely model 
for Mr. Booby) ; but as we have already explained in 
Chapter i., we do not think it likely that Wharton 
ever sat for Lovelace. If Eichardson meant anything 
by his words, it could be no more than that he had 
chapter and verse for some of Lovelace's nefarious 
doings in real life ; but Lovelace himself is an effort of 
his imagination, invented and modified and adjusted 
to meet the necessities not of realistic portraiture, 
but of a preconceived story and the evolution of a 
heroine's character. Eichardson, in fact, was not a 
little put to it to make him at once sufficiently attrac- 
tive and sufficiently detestable for the part he had to 
play. " Lovelace's character," he writes to Hill, 29th 
Oct. 1746, " I intend to be unamiable, as I hinted : I 
once read to a young Lady Part of his Character, and 
then his End ; and upon her pitying him, and wishing 
he had been rather made a Penitent, than to be killed, 
I made him still more and more odious, by his 
heighten'd Arrogance and Triumph, as well as by Vile 
Actions, leaving only some Qualities in him, laudable 



90 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

enough to justify her first Liking." This was written a 
full year before the publication of the earliest volumes 
of the book. In December 1747, when they had 
appeared, the character is still being altered. " My 
Libertine," he tells Hill, " in the next Volume proves 
to be so vile that I regretted the Necessity, as I may 
call it, which urged me to put the two former to 
Press." All this seems to indicate that there was very 
little study of real life in Lovelace ; but that he grew 
with the progress of the story in the heated brain of 
his inventor, who furnished him with fresh qualities or 
defects as they were required by the development of 
the plot. It is the triumph of the author's instinctive 
art that, notwithstanding the improbabilities and in- 
consistencies of the portrait, the picture is still decep- 
tive. Lovelace's crime is wholly indefensible and 
unpardonable ; but it is perhaps intelligible that his 
dash and spirit, his wit, his impudence, his good looks 
and his airs de vainqueur should have found him in- 
dulgent apologists among some (Richardson indeed 
says "most") of the author's lady friends. "If I 
was to die for it," writes one of these, " I cannot help 
being fond of Lovelace. A sad dog ! why would you 
make him so wicked, and yet so agreeable ? " It is but 
fair to say that this was only at the fourth volume, 
when he had not yet filled up the measure of his 
iniquity. After vol. v. her tone is changed. "You 
have drawn a villain above nature," she cries out. 
" And you make that villian a sensible man, with many 
good qualities, and you have declared him not an un- 
believer." Even in the infancy of the novel, and in 
the throes of sentiment, the voice of the critic was 
heard in the land. For this, with other things, is very 



iv.] CLABISSA 91 

much what modern critics say of what Aristotle would 
have classed as that "improbable impossibility/' 
Eobert Lovelace. 1 

But while the writer (it is " Mrs. Belf our ") touches 
these anomalies, she says nothing about another matter 
which has exercised many, and that is the apparent 
impunity, with which, in spite of the most reckless 
frankness in his written communications, Lovelace 
carries out his flagitious proceedings. The first note 
is sounded by Mrs. Barbauld, who thinks that in France 
"his epistolary memoirs," and his gallantries (with 
married women) might have passed muster ; but that, 
in England, he "would have been run through the 
body, long before he had seen the face of Clarissa, or 
ColoDel Morden." Scott also expresses his surprise 
that Clarissa did not invoke the assistance of a magis- 
trate. " We will venture to say that Justice Fielding 
would have afforded her [Clarissa] his most effectual 
protection ; and that if Tomlinson, the false Miss 
Montague, or any other of Lovelace's agents, had 
ventured to appear in the office [at Bow Street], they 
would have been committed by his worship as old 
acquaintances." The same ground is expanded by 
the late H. D. Traill in an admirable article in the 
Contemporary Review for October 1883. " The sufferings 

1 See Twining's Aristotle's Treatise on Poetry, 2nd ed., 1812, 
i.,184, and note. " Such a being as Caliban, for example, is impos- 
sible. Yet Shakespeare has made the character appear probable ; 
not certainly, to reason, but to imagination: that is, we make no 
difficulty about the possibility of it in reading. Is not the Love- 
lace of Richardson, in this view, more out of nature, more improb- 
able, than the Caliban of Shakespeare ? The latter is, at least, 
consistent. I can imagine such a monster as Caliban : I never 
could imagine such a man as Lovelace." 



02 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

of Clarissa/' he says, " are as those of an imprisoned 
princess in a fairy-tale; the cruelty and power of 
Lovelace is that of the giant ogre of the same order 
of fable." Where was the law, he goes on to ask, 
that enabled a libertine to keep in confinement a 
young lady of condition, and himself meanwhile to go 
about the world unmolested; and in another excel- 
lent dialogue in his New Lucian (" Fielding and 
Richardson ") he makes Fielding say that " one of his 
runners would have laid ' Captain ' Lovelace and his 
lawless lieutenants by the heels in a very short time," 
— to which the Eichardson of the colloquy has nothing 
to reply. His own contemporaries had asked similar 
questions. "It is even a doubt with me," says a 
French critic of 1749 (translated in the Gentleman's 
Magazine for June and August of that year, and 
hailing from Amsterdam), " whether probability is 
preserved in the detestable audacity of Lovelace." 
... "Is this [enumerating his misdeeds] possible 
in a country so jealous of its laws and its liberty? " 
. . . "An answer to these questions can only be 
expected from a native of England" " Mr. Urban " 
does answer in a footnote, and his answer is not con- 
vincing. " He [Lovelace] defied the laws of his country, 
as many of his cast do. 1 . . . Are there not such men 
in all nations ? in all governments ? Need we refer to 
the public executions for crimes the most atrocious ? " 
This, we shrewdly suspect, is Eichardson's own defence, 
as he refers to this very article in a " Postscript " to 

1 Lord Peterborough was said to have boasted, in his unpublished 
Memoirs, that he had committed three capital crimes before he 
was twenty. But then — as Swift says — he was " the ramblingest 
lying rogue on earth." 



iv.] CLABISSA 93 

Clarissa. "Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule 
the law," — -he would probably have answered with 
Goldsmith. He had a servile conception of the privi- 
leges of rank, and he had a thoroughly democratic 
belief in the chartered wrong-doing of the upper classes. 
Moreover, for the needs of his story, he did not for a 
moment intend that Lovelace should be punished by 
the law. " There is no fear of being hanged for such 
a crime as this while we have money or friends." . . . 
" Besides, have we not been in danger before now, for 
worse facts ? " These are Lovelace's own utterances 
to his bosom friend, John Belford, while sketching 
— very brilliantly, it must be owned, and out of pure 
sport — a fancy project for the abduction of Miss Howe 
and her mother. 1 

Belford and Miss Howe are the chief secondary 
characters of Clarissa in whom it is possible to take 
any interest. The lady is a very charming personage 
and correspondent, and it is to her that Clarissa 
(save when it is intercepted by Lovelace) addresses 
the chronicle of her misfortunes. Miss Howe is a 
contrast to her friend, to whom she is devoted. She 
has common sense, high spirits, and wit, which last she 
makes use of to triumph over her worthy and rather 
ordinary lover, Mr. Charles Hickman. Belford is a 
brother-rake to whom, in the words of the Preface, 
Lovelace periodically " communicates, in confidence, 
all the secret purposes of an intriguing head and 

1 The case of Lord Baltimore, to which Scott refers, presents 
certain curions affinities to that of Lovelace. Lord Baltimore 
was tried in 1768, twenty years after Clarissa, for a similar 
offence and acquitted. In his defence, while professing himself 
a man of pleasure, he warmly repudiated infidel opinions. 



94 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

resolute heart." He is a collector and preserver of 
the correspondence — no light task. Gradually, he is 
reformed by the spectacle of Clarissa's beauty and 
purity, and in the end becomes her chief friend and 
protector. There are some five-and-thirty other char- 
acters; but they are merely subordinate, and exist 
mainly for the sake of piecing the story as disclosed by 
the above-named four. Of these again, the chief are the 
members of the Harlowe family, the sombre, despotic 
father, the weak mother, the envious brother and 
jealous sister, the sordid uncles, alike in their char- 
acteristics of inherited pigheadedness and congenital 
stupidity. 

That Clarissa is Bichardson's masterpiece, there can 
be no doubt. For Pamela is but an incondite produc- 
tion, which really ends in the second of its four 
volumes, while, in Grandison, though the manner is 
perfected, and the method matured, the movement 
of the story for the most part advances no more 
than a rocking-horse. But in Clarissa the simplicity 
of the central idea, the unhasting yet unresting evolu- 
tion of the tragedy, and, above all, the extraordinary 
ability exhibited in the portraiture of the two leading 
personages, raise it immeasurably above either its fore- 
runner or its successor. Bichardson has been called 
an imaginative realist, by which we presume it is 
intended to convey that, as was said of Defoe, he 
lied like truth; and it is obvious that many of his 
ideas must represent abnormal accretions of invention 
around the minutest germs of experience. We have 
his own words, through Mrs. Barbauld, that, while 
professing to be natural, he had no personal knowl- 
edge of scenes corresponding to many that he has 



iv.] CLABISSA 95 

described. But this would not prevent his hearing 
about them, and we suspect that the little writing- 
closet at North End must often have twittered with 
pious horror at new narratives of outraged innocence, 
or fresh disclosures of the vices of an aristocracy indi- 
cated respectfully by oral dashes and asterisks. Yet 
even this, though it might explain the scenes at 
Mrs. Sinclair's and the spunging-house, would not 
throw any light upon the vivacity of the Howe abduc- 
tion letter, or the travesty of the pseudo-Lady Betty 
and " cousin Charlotte/' or the inimitable scene in the 
glove-shop at King's Street, Covent Garden. Of these, 
and a hundred other passages, there is no solution but 
the presence of that uninherited and incommunicable 
quality which is Genius. 

Although the publication of the three final volumes 
of Clarissa was so long deferred, it seems that the 
catastrophe was fully anticipated by many of the 
author's readers. " I know not," he says in a letter 
of 10th May 1748, after the issue of volumes three 
and four, " whether it [the sale] has not surf er'd much 
by the Catastrophe's being too much known and 
talked of. I intend another Sort of Happiness 
(founded on the Xn system) for my Heroine, than 
that which was to depend upon the Will and Pleasure, 
and uncertain Beformation and good Behaviour of a 
Vile Libertine, to whom I could not think of giving 
a Person of such Excellence. The sex give too much 
Countenance to Bakes of this vile Cast for any one 
to make such a Compliment to their Errors." "I 
had never . . . designed," he says again, "that the 
Catastrophe should be generally known. But one 
Eriend and another got the Ms. out of my Hands; 



96 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

and some of them must have indiscreetly, tho ? without 
any bad Intention, talked of it in all places. " In a 
later letter (7th Nov.) just before the issue of the 
concluding volumes, he says, " These [advance copies] 
will show you, Sir, that I intend more than a Novel 
or Romance by this Piece; and that it is of the Tragic 
Kind : In short, that I thought my principal Char- 
acter could not be rewarded by any Happiness short 
of the Heavenly. But how have I suffered by this 
from the Cavils of some, from the Prayers of others, 
from the Intreaties of many more, to make what is 
called a Happy Ending! — Mr. Lyttelton, the late 
Mr. Thomson, 1 Mr. Gibber, and Mr. Fielding have 
been among these." That the author of Joseph Andrews 
had welcomed the first instalment of Clarissa in the 
Jacobite's Journal, is already known ; but it is inter- 
esting to find him among the advocates of " poetical 
justice." Cibber, however, is the only one of the four 
of whose views we have any definite particulars, 
and these are drawn from a letter written by Mrs. 
Pilkington to Richardson as far back as June 1745 — 
a very early date in the history of the book. She had 
related to Mr. Cibber, she says, "the catastrophe of 
the story " and the author's " truly religious and moral 
reason for it." Thereupon the tears stood in the eyes 
of the old comedian ; he raved theatrically ; he grew 
profane in his language. " He should no longer believe 
Providence, or eternal Wisdom, or Goodness governed 
the world, if merit, innocence, and beauty were to be 
so destroyed." Even Mrs. Pilkington herself did not 
approve the degradation of Clarissa. " Spare her 
virgin purity, dear Sir, spare it ! Consider, if this 

i The poet of the Seasons died 27th August 1748. . 



iv.] CLABISSA 97 

wounds both Mr. Cibber and me (who neither of us 
set up for immaculate chastity), what must it do with 
those who possess that inestimable treasure ? " 

This, as we have said, was written in 1745, more 
than two years before the publication of the two 
earliest volumes. But the most impassioned appeal 
to the author did not reach him until after volumes 
three and four had come out. A lady, writing under 
the name of "Mrs. Belfour," demanded of him in 
October 1748, whether it were true that the story 
would end tragically, and requested a reply in the 
Wliitehall Eveniny Post, in which paper, according to 
Mrs. Barbauld, Eichardson inserted a notice. There- 
upon, this excitable inquirer addressed an impassioned 
letter to him, imploring him to alter his scheme, and 
make his " almost despairing readers half mad with 
joy." She pleaded not only for Clarissa; she pleaded 
for the reformation of Lovelace. " If you disappoint 
me, attend to my curse," she went on. "May the 
hatred of all the young, beautiful, and virtuous, for 
ever be your portion ! and may your eyes never 
behold anything but age and deformity ! may you 
meet with applause only from envious old maids, 
surly bachelors, and tyrannical parents ! may you be 
doomed to the company of such ! and after death, may 
their ugly souls haunt you ! Now make Lovelace and 
Clarissa unhappy if you dare." 

Eichardson replied, defending his action with more 
decision and spirit than might have been expected in 
an author " affected by tremors." He had designed, 
he said, to combat and expose the pernicious doctrine 
that a reformed rake makes the best husband; and 
he justifies his "unhappy ending," as he afterwards 



98 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

did in print, by a reference to the doctrines of Mr. 
Joseph. Addison as expressed in the fortieth number of 
the Spectator. 1 Then he sends her vol. v. of the novel, 
which, as it contains the catastrophe, only makes 
matters worse. She still implores him to reconsider his 
plan. " It is too shocking and barbarous a story for 
publication." "I am as mad as the poor injured 
Clarissa," she says, in concluding her epistle; "and 
am afraid I cannot help hating you, if you alter not 
your scheme." Other letters follow. She does not 
care to see the remaining volumes ; she cannot promise 
to read them ; she is not at all anxious to know what 
becomes of all Clarissa's wicked relations. She wishes 
they had all been dead ten years ago. "I am in- 
different now about every character in the book." 
When she does read them, as of course she does, she 
is terribly affected. "I verily believe I have shed 
a pint of tears, and my heart is still bursting, tho' 
they cease not to flow at this moment, nor will, I fear, 
for some time." " My spirits are strangely seized," she 
says again. "My sleep is disturbed; waking in the 
night, I burst into a passion of crying ; so I did at 
breakfast this morning, and just now again." She 
is still unconvinced as to the ending of the book. 
She has lost an amusement she had set her heart 
upon, and now she must lock up the volumes, never 
more to be looked into. It might have been other- 
wise; it might have been that some one of them 
would for her life have " adorned her toilet." These 

!"We shall defeat this great End [the raising of Commisera- 
tion and Terror in the Minds of the Audience] , if we always 
make Virtue and Innocence happy and successful." — Spectator , 
16th April 1711. 



iv.] CLABISSA 99 

testimonies to Richardson's power " to raise and alarm 
the Passions " come from a married woman of forty. 
We shall hear more of her in the succeeding chapter 
under her real name. 

In a Postscript to the novel Eichardson deals with 
the above objections, and with some others which had 
been made to different parts of his heroine's story. 
As regards a " fortunate ending/' he elaborates his 
arguments to " Mrs. Belfour," and justifies his action 
by long quotations from Addison and Rapin with 
regard to the practice of the ancients. And he winds 
up by saying that " if the temporary sufferings of the 
Virtuous and the Good can be accounted for and 
justified on Pagan principles, many more and infinitely 
stronger reasons will occur to a Christian Eeader in 
behalf of what are called unhappy Catastrophes, from 
a consideration of the doctrine of future rewards ; which 
is every where strongly enforced in the History of 
Clarissa." Nevertheless, he contends that poetical 
justice has on the whole been observed in his book, 
since all the bad characters are exemplarily punished, 
while the good ones are made signally happy, Clarissa 
alone excepted, whom " Heaven only could reward." He 
goes on to vindicate her from the charge of coldness ; 
defends his making Lovelace a believer — notwithstand- 
ing his infamy, and extenuates the apparent insipidity of 
Miss Howe's lover, Hickman. He excuses his choice of 
the Epistolary Style upon the plea that he had already 
employed it with success in Pamela, and mistrusted 
his talent for narrative. And he defends, less success- 
fully, " the Length of the piece " (it was the first and 
second volumes in particular that were objected to) 
by the contention that in order to give an air of 



100 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

probability to a story of real life, minuteness and 
circumstantiality were unavoidable, in addition to 
which, it had always been proposed that the story 
should be regarded as the mere vehicle of the in- 
struction which was its real object. This brings us 
naturally to Johnson's well-known answer to Erskine 
when he complained that the author of Clarissa was 
very tedious. " Why, Sir," he said, " if you were to 
read Richardson for the story, your impatience would 
be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. 
But you must read him for the sentiment, and consider 
the story as only giving occasion to the sentiment." 

The Postscript, it will be observed, makes no refer- 
ence to certain other objections to what one of 
Richardson's foreign critics designates " the privilege, 
which he derives from the unbounded liberty of his 
country." The writer who has been already quoted 
from the Gentleman 7 s of 1749, 1 and who, although he 
describes Richardson as " Mr. Robinson, a Bookseller," 
appears in other respects to be sagacious and well 
informed, complains, amid much praise, that the par- 
ticulars of freedoms taken by Lovelace " exceed the 
bounds of decency." The scenes at Mrs. Sinclair's — 
he says — make him apprehend — an apprehension 
which, it is needless to say, proved in the sequel to be 
quite groundless — that in France Clarissa would share 
the fate of Corneille's tragedy of TJieodore, which failed 
upon the stage, on account of a similar subject. These 
censures were answered by Mr. Urban, probably, as 
before suggested, upon the inspiration of Richardson 
himself. "The freedoms here objected to, seem to 
have been particularised to do justice to the virtue 

1 See ante, p. 92. 



it.] CLAB1SSA 101 

of Clarissa. . . . Whatever coarseness of expression the 
great Corneille was guilty of in his TJieodore, all such 
seems to be avoided in Clarissa. A nice person of 
the sex may not, moreover, be able to bear those 
scenes in action, and on the stage, in presence of 
a thousand witnesses, which she may not think 
objectible in her closet." "Objectible" has certainly 
a smack of the Eichardsonian vocabulary. In what 
is apparently a very rare Eichardsonian pamphlet, 
the Answer to the Letter of a Very Reverend and Worthy 
Gentleman, observing upon the warmth of what is 
known as the fire-plot scene in volume four, which 
the writer had characterized as the " only exception- 
able" scene in the entire book, Eichardson defends 
himself at great length. His defence is too detailed 
to be summarised here, but its main points are the 
obvious ones that his descriptions are everywhere 
more restrained than those of his contemporaries, and 
that in such a description as that excepted against, 
and given by Lovelace himself, "the Lady's personal 
as well as intellectual Beauties, and his avowed Passion 
for her, characteristically . . . required that it should 
be done with Warmth." Eichardson, in short, shows 
himself more of an artist and realist than the 
moralist he professed to be. As an artist his defence 
is unanswerable. But as a moralist, it is easy to see 
that he might be accused (as Fielding was) of depicting 
his hazardous situations with too manifest a gusto ; and 
there is something also in the suggestion of M. Texte 
that, with Eichardson as with Eousseau, " sensibility 
verges upon sensuality." In any case, the objections 
above referred to show that, notwithstanding the 
favourite explanation of " other times, other manners," 



102 SAMUEL KICHAKDSON [chap. 

contemporary critics of Clarissa found very much the 
same fault with her history as people do to-day. 

The copy of the little pamphlet we have before us 
has no title-page, so that it is not possible to say when 
it was published. But the date at the end of the 
letter is 8th June 1749. A year later, Messrs. Osborn, 
Millar, Eivington, and Leake issued a small octavo 
of 76 pages entitled Meditations collected from the 
Sacred Books; and adapted to the different Stages of a 
deep Distress; gloriously surmounted by Patience, Piety 
and Resignation. Being those mentioned in the History 
of Clarissa as drawn up for her own Use. 1 Opposite the 
bastard-title is a sonnet to Eichardson signed T. E. 
(i.e. Thomas Edwards of the Canons of Criticism). The 
" Advertisement to the Eeader " states that the Editor 
of the History of Clarissa having transcribed, for the 
use of some select friends, the Thirty -six Meditations 
of the heroine, four only of which are inserted in the 
history, was induced to give them to the public " as 
serviceable to all such as labour under great afflictions 
and disappointments." It would also serve, it was 
alleged, to accentuate the fact that Clarissa was not a 
mere Novel or Romance, but a religious work. Whether 
the Meditations which follow, and which are referred 
to in a letter to Eichardson from Mrs. Delany's sister, 
Mrs. Dewes, of 24th September 1750, were originally 
part of the unabridged book, is not clear ; but Clarissa 
certainly writes meditations and leaves them in her 
Will to her friend Mrs. Norton, while the Advertise- 
ment further gives Belford's account of her from 
Letter cxx. The different exercises are from Job, 

1 For reference and access to this little-known book, the 
writer is indebted to the kindness of Mr. H. Buxton Forman. 



iv.] CLABISSA 103 

Ecclesiasticus, the Wisdom of Solomon, and the Psalms, 
and in a preface purporting to be prepared by herself 
she is said to have reaped great consolation from them. 
The book is necessarily one of which not much need 
be said in this place ; but it enforces the sincerity of 
Richardson's attitude as a moralist, and what is 
perhaps more interesting still, illustrates the extraor- 
dinary way in which he identified, and continued to 
identify, himself with his characters. To a reader 
who should happen upon the little volume without 
further knowledge, it must certainly appear to bear 
all the marks of that genuineness which the author 
endeavoured to suggest. 

Various attempts, even from the outset, appear to 
have been made to shorten Clarissa. Prevost's trans- 
lation of 1753 was really an abridgment. Nine years 
later, after Prevost's death, Panckoucke the publisher 
invited Rousseau to make further reductions. But 
Eousseau, whose indolence was great, whose knowl- 
edge of English was nil, and who perhaps (as 
M. Texte suggests) was not particularly anxious to 
magnify further a rival author already sufficiently 
popular, put aside the task which, upon a hint of 
Villemain, was eventually performed by Jules Janin in 
1846. M. Janin prefixed an interesting introduction 
to his work. The latest experiment in this kind is 
apparently that of M. Ernest Guillemot, who, in 1875, 
squeezed Clarissa's eight volumes into a pamphlet of 
some 150 pages. In English the first compressed 
edition was that by J. H. Emmert in the Novelist, 
1792. In 1868 appeared two abbreviated editions, — 
one in the " Railway Library " by Mrs. Ward, the 
other by E. S. Dallas. Mr. Dallas, acting upon Scott's 



104 SAMUEL KICHABDSON [chap. 

opinion that Clarissa might have been a good deal 
abridged at the beginning — an opinion which, from the 
author's Postscript, was shared by his contemporaries 
— has contrived to bring it within the limits of a 
rather closely printed three-volume novel. It was also 
condensed at New York in 1874. The late Edward 
FitzGerald, an ardent Eichardsonian, frequently refers 
in his letters to the length of the book, which, shorn of 
what he termed its " pedantry/' by which presumably 
he means its preachments, would in his opinion (and 
favourite capitals) be " one of the great, original, Works 
of the World." There was an impression that Fitz- 
Gerald had actually treated it after his favourite fashion 
by cutting out the surplusage, and binding up the 
rest ; but his editor, Mr. Aldis Wright, in a letter to 
the Athenceam for 29th June 1901, stated that he 
had failed to trace any effort of the kind. 

But why abridge at all ? Why not leave the " large, 
still, Book," as Tennyson called it, intonsis capillis, — 
with locks unshorn of the shearer ? Any retrenchment 
must be mutilation. And why mutilate to please the 
modern reader who, when all is said and done, will 
probably prefer a modern performance ? Clarissa is of 
its author, and of its time ; it can never be of us, or of 
our time. Eichardson was fully alive to his prolixity, 
and fought doggedly against it. Consistently with his 
aim and his purpose, he himself curtailed as much as 
he thought his book would bear. Why not leave a 
great artist who was true to his instincts in small 
things to be also tme to his instincts in great things ? 
His genuine lovers will never be contented with a com- 
pressed Clarissa; and for the much-considered " modern 
reader " he must e'en be left to the fate which Johnson 



iv.] CLABISSA 105 

foresaw for those who study their Bichardson for the 
story and the story alone. At the same time, it may 
be permitted to doubt whether, in the present year of 
grace, he will ever find an admirer fervent enough to 
peruse him, like his " sincerely obliged" Miss Margaret 
Collier, four several times ; still less to read Clarissa, 
like Mr. Edwards of Turrick, " at least once a year," 
in addition to Pamela and Grandison. 



CHAPTER V 

CORRESPONDENCE, 1749-54 

The " lewd and ungenerous engraftment " on Pamela 
of Fielding's Joseph Andrews had naturally been a 
terrible thorn in Richardson's side. If to this be added 
that, rightly or wrongly, he also saw in him the anony- 
mous author of Shamela, the offence must certainly have 
"smelt to heaven." Of late, however, Fielding had 
made some overtures towards an amende honorable. 
In the Jacobite' s Journal, he had cordially praised the 
first two volumes of Clarissa. " Such Simplicity, such 
Manners, such deep Penetration into Nature ; such 
Power to raise and alarm the Passions, few Writers, 
either ancient or modern, have been possessed of," — he 
had declared. And then he had made an apposite quota- 
tion from Horace, 1 which quotation (with a line or two 
more to show that he had consulted the original) 
Richardson subsequently inserted in his Postscript, and 
an admirer turned into the first quatrain of an intro- 
ductory sonnet to Clarissa's history : — 

" Master of the heart ! whose magic skill 
The close recesses of the soul can find, 
Can rouse, becalm, and terrify the mind, 
Now melt with pity, now with anguish thrill " ; 

1 " Pectus inaniter angit, 
Irritat, mulcet, falsis terroribus implet 
Ut magus." Hor. Epp. ii. i. 211-13. 

106 



chap, v.] CORRESPONDENCE, 1749-54 107 

and so forth. As we have seen, Fielding had also been 
among the advocates of a " happy ending/' — which was 
an additional testimony to his interest in the book. 
But in February 1749 he unhappily sinned again, and 
this time beyond the possibility of pardon. He pub- 
lished Tom Jones. 

It is probable that the publication of Tom Jones 
annoyed Eichardson far more than the publication 
either of Shamela or of Joseph Aiidreivs. For these he 
could always console himself by real or pretended 
contempt, and by what, in many cases, was the genuine 
sympathy of his friends. But with Tom Jones, Fielding 
appeared as a definite rival in fiction, professing like 
himself to administer a " new Province of Writing/' 
and having a public of recognised and enthusiastic 
supporters. The young ladies of her neighbourhood, 
" Mrs. Belf our " told the sensitive author of Clarissa, 
were for ever talking about their favourites as their 
" Tom Joneses/' and the gentlemen on their side had 
their Sophias, one of them going so far as to give that 
honoured name to his " Dutch mastiff puppy." In a 
flutter of jealous apprehension, Eichardson turned to 
his sympathetic friends, Astraea and Minerva at 
Plaistow. What did they think of this " coarse-titled " 
book, with its " spurious brat " ? He had not read it 
himself, — not he. But he evidently knew a good deal 
about its contents. Astraea and Minerva took him 
literally; and gave a very business-like, and far too 
favourable report of their impressions of Mr. Fielding's 
performance. Indeed, upon the whole, they blessed 
rather than cursed. They discovered in it " a double 
Merit, both of Head, and Heart" They praised its 
construction. They held that the events of the fable 



108 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

" rewarded Sincerity, punished and exposed Hypoc- 
risy, showed Pity and Benevolence in amiable Lights, 
and Avarice and Brutality in very despicable ones." 
This was too much for Eichardson who, while still 
declining to read the book, rejoined by criticising 
plot, hero, and heroine with such energy as to draw 
tears of vexation from the fine eyes of Minerva 
and Astraea, who presently found themselves in the 
discreditable predicament of having approved " a work 
of Evil Tendency." Nevertheless they stood gallantly 
by their guns, and still hoped, through their father, 
that when their honoured friend at Fulham had time 
to study Tom Jones for himself, he might detect " a 
Thread of Moral meaning " in it. Eichardson replied, 
of course, — and at length. He referred to Fielding as 
a " very indelicate, a very impetuous, an unyielding- 
spirited Man." But he promised vaguely that he 
would, if opportunity offered, " bestow a Eeading " on 
Tom Jones. Whether he eventually did so, it is diffi- 
cult to decide. But in a letter to another correspondent, 
dated January 1750 — a letter in which he continues 
to harp on " the weak, the insipid, the Eunaway, the 
Inn-frequenting Sophia " and her " illegitimate Tom " 
— he professes, as before, to speak on hearsay. Had 
he been at leisure to examine Tom Jones (if, indeed, it 
were possible to have leisure for such a task ! ), he 
would no doubt be able " to do the Author impartial 
Justice." Upon this point, perhaps, it may be per- 
missible to entertain misgivings. But he must, at 
least, have had his consolations. One Solomon Lowe, 
the author of a "Critical Spelling Book," gravely 
assured him that all Europe would ultimately ring 
with Clarissa, " when a Cracker, that was some thous d 



t.] CORRESPONDENCE, 1749-54 109 

hours a-composing, 1 will no longer be heard or talk ? t-of." 
Mr. Lowe's letter is to be seen at South Kensington ; 
and Eichardson has gravely endorsed it with his own 
hand — "Cracker, T. Jones." 

Of the correspondents to whom this chapter relates, 
the majority are women. " My acquaintance," says 
Richardson in one place, " lies chiefly among the 
ladies; I care not who knows it." In the interval 
between the publication of Pamela and the publication 
of Clarissa, he had added a good many new friends of 
the other sex to his list. The most voluminous of 
these was the lady already referred to as "Mrs. 
Belfour, ,, of whom, and of whose real title, we shall 
speak hereafter. Among the earlier, come three 
names, with which Eichardson and his rival are more 
or less connected — those of Sarah Fielding, and the 
two sisters, Jane and Margaret Collier. With Sarah 
Fielding, and indeed with all the Miss Fieldings, 
Eichardson appears to have been on a friendly footing. 
In his letter to Astrsea and Minerva Hill he says, "I 
love Four worthy Sisters of his [Fielding], with whom 
I am well acquainted." As already pointed out, in 
speaking of the Young correspondence, Sarah Fielding 
must have been a visitor at North End as early as 
1744, and in one of her own epistles, dated January 
1749, she refers to the gratification it would have 
afforded her to act as Bichardson's secretary. " Pleas- 
antly surprised should I have been, suddenly to have 
found all my thoughts strengthened, and my words 
flow into an easy and nervous style," she writes — 
expressions which suggest that the accomplished 
author of David Simple was not averse from exercising 

1 See Tom Jones, Bk. xi. Ch. i. 



110 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

that form of flattery which Bacon defines as praising 
a man for those things wherein " he is most Defective " 
— as, for instance, he himself did when he commended 
James I. for his slobbering elocution. But it must be 
owned that if his friends praised Richardson, he paid 
them (like Garrick) in kind. "I have just gone 
thro ? " — " re-perused " is the word elsewhere — " your 
two vols, of Letters," he writes to Sarah Fielding in 
December 1756. [These were manifestly the Familiar 
Letters between the Principal Characters in David Simple, 
1747.] "What a knowledge of the human heart! 
Well might a critical judge of writing say, as he did 
to me, that your late brother's knowledge of it was 
not (fine writer as he was) comparable to yours. His 
was but as the knowledge of the outside of a clock- 
work machine, while yours was that of all the finer 
springs and movements of the inside." Curiously 
enough, this is very much the praise which, a dozen 
years later, Johnson, no doubt the critical judge 
referred to, gave to Richardson himself. "There 
was as great a difference between them [Richardson 
and Fielding]," he said, " as between a man who knew 
how a watch was made, and a man who could tell the 
hour by looking on the dial-plate." With her brother 
on one side, and Richardson on the other, poor Miss 
Fielding must have been sadly embarrassed. For if 
Richardson praised her, her brother, on his part, was 
not behindhand. He had written a friendly preface 
to David Simple; and he had not only prefaced the 
Familiar Letters, but, as Richardson should have known 
if he read to the end of the second volume, had 
written five of them himself, and those by no means 
the least important. And, of those which he had not 



v.] CORRESPONDENCE, 1749-54 111 

written, he had said that they contained " Touches 
of Nature" — "as fine, as he had ever met with in 
any of the Authors, who had made Human Nature 
their Subject." Thus we have the first two novelists 
of their age, and rivals to boot, combining to praise 
a third, whose work — to use an expressive phrase of 
Mr. Forster — must now be disinterred in order to be 
discussed. 

Sarah Fielding, nevertheless, was by no means with- 
out ability. She was a scholar, in days when women- 
scholars were rarer ; and, according to those who knew 
her later at Bath, much respected, both for her char- 
acter and talents, though she must always have been 
in necessitous circumstances. This must also have 
been the case of her friends, the two Miss Colliers, 
the daughters of Arthur Collier, the metaphysician ; 
and there are indications that they were all three 
indebted to Richardson for presents of money. Jane 
Collier was Sarah Fielding's collaborator in the " dra- 
matic Fable " called " The Cry." The other sister, 
Margaret, a frequent sojourner at North End, was 
also the young lady who is said to have cut out in 
paper that profile of Fielding which is fabled to 
have served as a guide to Hogarth in drawing his 
friend's protrait from memory. She had lived with 
Fielding at Ealing, where she witnessed his will, and 
she was one of the little party which accompanied 
him to Lisbon. But her obligations to Richardson 
must have afterwards wholly overcome any gratitude 
which she may have owed to his rival. " I was sadly 
vexed," she writes in 1755 from Ryde, to which place, 
after her sister's death, she had retired, " at my first 
coming, at a report which had prevailed here, of my 



112 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

being the author of Mr. Fielding's last work, The 
Voyage to Lisbon : the reason which was given for 
supposing it mine, was to the last degree mortifying, 
viz. that it was so very bad a performance, and fell 
so far short of his other works, it must needs be the 
person with him who wrote it." In much the same 
strain writes another of Bichardson's friends. "I 
have lately read over with much indignation Fielding's 
last piece, called his Voyage to Lisbon. That a man, 
who had led such a life as he had, should trifle in 
that manner when immediate death was before his 
eyes, is amazing. From this book I am confirmed 
in what his other works had fully persuaded me of, 
that with all his parade of pretences to virtuous and 
humane affections, the fellow had no heart. And so 
— his knell is knolled." 

The writer of this precious piece of criticism was 
Thomas Edwards, a bachelor, and a barrister who 
never practised. Next to Young he was the most 
important of Bichardson's male correspondents. He 
does not often give vent to such outbursts, and seems 
to have been usually what Mrs. Barbauld calls him, a 
" very good, pious, and kind-hearted man." He was 
the friend of Eichard Owen Cambridge, Walpole's 
" Cambridge the Everything," of the parodist, Isaac 
Hawkins Browne, and of Mr. Speaker Onslow. In- 
deed, it may have been at Ember Court that he first 
made Richardson's acquaintance, for they were cer- 
tainly there together. His first letter, from which it 
is clear that he has also been visiting at North End, 
is an acknowledgment of the " divine Clarissa," to 
whom he attributes an exaggerated effect upon the 
manners of the age. " I am not without hope that 



v.] CORRESPONDENCE, 1749-54 113 

this excellent work has already had some influence on 
the town ; and cannot help thinking that the approba- 
tion with which I am told the tender scenes between 
Eomeo and Juliet were received, above the humorous 
ones between Benedick and Beatrice, might be owing 
to impressions made by Clarissa, who has tamed and 
humanised hearts that before were not so very sen- 
sible. " x Richardson, of course, was delighted, and a 
correspondence ensued which lasted for several years, 
the quotation as to Fielding being taken from a letter 
of May 1755, whereas the words just given are from 
one of January 1749. Edwards was, in his way,' a 
notable man ; and Miss Thomson is right in claiming 
for him a position among the pioneers of the romantic 
revival. He was a genuine lover of the older writers 
— of Shakespeare, of Milton, of Spenser in particular, 
who had set him upon writing sonnets, although he 
afterwards observed the Miltonic rule. Many of these 
performances, which Richardson wanted to print during 
Edwards's life-time, are included in the Introduction to 
Cambridge's Works of 1803. There are others in the 
second volume of Dodsley's Collection, and, as we have 
seen, he composed an introductory sonnet for Clarissa's 
Meditations. Moreover, a few years earlier, he had 
written a clever Supplement to Warburtori' s Edition of 
Shakespeare , later known as the Canons of Criticism, in 

1 In November 1748 Much Ado about Nothing had beeu 
acted at Drury Lane with Garrick as Benedick, and Mrs. 
Pritchard as Beatrice. It ran eight nights, and was followed 
by Romeo and Juliet, with Barry as Romeo and Mrs. Gibber as 
Juliet. This was played for nineteen nights. But it is to be 
feared that Barry's magnificent presence and Mrs. Cibber's 
beauty had more to do with its success than the publication of 
Clarissa. 

i 



114 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

which he exposed some of the Bishop's arrogant pre- 
tensions, — a pamphlet concerning which it has always 
been held that it deserved more praise than Warbur- 
ton' s friend, Dr. Johnson, was inclined to allow to it. 
Eichardson, who fancied he had been snubbed by 
Warburton, would have pressed Edwards to expose 
Warburton further still in a rival edition of Pope. 
But although Edwards, like his friend Cambridge, had 
contributed minerals to Pope's Twickenham grotto, he 
was not so thorough-going an admirer of the author of 
the Essay on Man as to undertake this enterprise. His 
real enthusiasm was reserved for the older writers ; 
and his abilities were of that leisurely kind which 
dabbles in philology and folklore, skirts the fringes 
of a subject, and prefers to generalise about eclectic , 
editions and grumble at " vamping " publishers, rather 
than to embark with resolution upon any definite task. 
He visited North End frequently from his home at 
Turrick, near Wendover in Bucks, making friends with 
Eichardson's little circle of " Muses and Graces," and 
inspiring the younger members with his trick of 
sonneteering. He died finally under Eichardson's 
roof in 1757. 

Another of Eichardson's correspondents, with whom 
his acquaintance seems to have begun not long before 
the publication of Clarissa, was Miss Sarah Westcomb 
of Enfield. Eichardson had visited this young lady 
and her mother in their country-seat, and on his return 
wrote enthusiastically of the gardens, the summer- 
house, and the " truly serpentine river." Mrs. West- 
comb, who was a martyr to gout, and of whom we 
hear chiefly as being carried about her grounds in a 
sedan-chair all day long, was a widow, and Eichardson 



v.] CORRESPONDENCE, 1749-54 115 

seems to have been at once invested with an honorary- 
paternity which permitted him to correspond with 
Miss Sally at his ease. One of his letters to her from 
Tunbridge Wells was quoted in the previous chapter, 
and there is none more interesting in the rest of the 
batch. The young lady dwells edifyingly on her con- 
tempt for " Ranelagh's lofty dome, or Vauxhall's rural 
scenes/' and displays a praiseworthy disdain for the 
proceedings of the husband-hunting Miss Gunnings, 
who have been " starring " at Enfield. " May toupees, 1 
powder, lace, and essence (the composition of the 
modern pretty fellows) follow them in troops, to stare, 
and be stared at, till the more bashful youths give 
the first blush ! " So writes this gentle moralist ; and 
" her best and good papa " is enraptured at the senti- 
ments. "When women turn seekers," he replies 
oracularly, "it will not do. Gudgeons may bite; but 
not even then but by accident, and through inex- 
perience of the wiles of anglers. ... I hear they [the 
Gunnings] have been rudely treated at Windsor, as 
they were at Edmonton." Nevertheless, when Miss 
Westcomb went shortly afterwards to Ankerwyke 
(where she fished and caught " no, not even a gudgeon "), 
she unfortunately enjoyed herself so thoroughly that 
she forgot to write to her self-constituted parent at 
North End, who forthwith despatches a seven-page 
remonstrance to the errant " offspring of his mind." In 
1754 Miss Westcomb lost her mother, and not long after- 
wards, in July 1756, she is happily engaged to a very 
agreeable young gentleman, Mr. Scudamore, of Kent- 
church, Herefordshire. Richardson gave her away in 
August of that year at St. George's, Hanover Square, 

x See note, ante, p. 81. 



116 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

and the last we hear of her, in Mrs. Barbauld, is that 
she is making use (through Pamela) of Mr. Locke's 
maxims in the education of her little boy. 

One of the groups of correspondents from whom one 
would naturally have expected a good deal of interest, 
is disappointingly unfruitful; and that is the group 
who cluster round Dr. Patrick Delany at Dublin. 
Delany had known Eichardson as far back as 1739 ; and 
after his second marriage to Mrs. Pendarves, both that 
lady, her sister Mrs. Dewes, and her friends Mrs. 
Donnellan and Miss Sutton, as well as the Doctor him- 
self, wrote at intervals to Eichardson between 1750 
and 1758. The theme, as usual, is very much the 
" divine Clarissa/' and Eichardson's other performances, 
past and future. Upon the whole, Mrs. Donnellan, 
whom one of Mrs. Barbauld's informants remembered 
at North End, "a venerable old lady, with sharp- 
piercing eyes," is the most interesting. She was un- 
married, well-educated, and well-connected; and her 
knowledge of polite society was not without its use to 
Eichardson, always seeking to recruit and supplement 
his imagination by actual " documents." Her worst 
fault is her playing up to Eichardson' s petty jealousy 
of Pielding, who had now given further offence by the 
publication of Amelia. Writing on the topic of the 
" good man," who was to form the subject of Eichard- 
son's next work, Mrs. Donnellan says — "Will you 
leave us to Capt. Booth and Betty Thoughtless [Mrs. 
Haywood's novel with that title] for our examples ? 
As for poor Amelia, she is so great a fool we pity her, 
but cannot be humble enough to desire to imitate her. 
. . . Poor Fielding, I believe, designed to be good, 
but did not know how, and in the attempt lost his 



v.] CORRESPONDENCE, 1749-54 117 

genius, low humour." Richardson's reply is a screed 
of malevolence. " Will I leave you to Captain Booth ? 
Capt. Booth, Madam, has done his own business. 
Mr. Fielding has over-written himself, or rather under- 
written ; and in his own journal seems ashamed of his 
last piece ; and has promised that the same muse shall 
write no more for him. The piece, in short, is as 
dead, as if it had been published forty years ago, as 
to sale." And then he goes on to say that he has 
read but the first volume, that he had intended to 
go through with it, but that he found the characters 
and situations so " wretchedly low and dirty " that he 
could not be interested in any one of them, and he 
finally winds up with a paragraph of scandalous gossip 
touching Fielding, his first wife, his characters, and his 
works. 

That Amelia was not as great a success as Tom Jones, 
is true ; and we have the word of Miss Elizabeth Carter 
that the Beaux and Fine Ladies disliked the author's 
new type of wifehood, and were unanimous in pro- 
nouncing her history to be " very sad stuff " — a verdict 
with which Miss Carter — to her credit be it spoken — 
does not seem to have concurred. But it is instruc- 
tive to compare Richardson's shrewish and ill-natured 
utterances with the actual passages from the Covent- 
Garclen Journal, to which he makes reference. Field- 
ing brings his book before his own " Court of Censorial 
Enquiry." He lets Amelia's accusers speak ; but he 
disdains to plead her cause against them. " If you, 
Mr. Censor, are yourself a Parent, you will view me 
with Compassion when I declare I am the Father of 
this poor Girl the Prisoner at the Bar ; nay, when I 
go farther, and avow, that of all my Offspring she is 



118 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

niy favourite Child." He explains what models he 
has followed, and then continues, " I do not think my 
Child is entirely free from Faults. I know nothing 
human that is so ; but surely she does not deserve the 
Eancour with which she hath been treated by the 
Public. However, it is not my Intention, at present, 
to make any Defence; but shall submit to a Com- 
promise, which hath been always allowed in this 
Court in all Prosecutions for Dulness. I do, therefore, 
solemnly declare to you, Mr. Censor, that I will 
trouble the World no more with any Children of Mine 
by the same Muse." One must be a rival, and a jealous 
one, not to feel the effect of these sad and dignified 
utterances. But Richardson's spleen was " nulla medi- 
cabilis herba" and the day after he had written to 
Mrs. Donnellan, he breaks out to another correspond- 
ent. " It is beyond my conception," he says, " that a 
man of family, and who had some learning, and who 
really is a writer, should descend so excessively low, 
in all his pieces. Who can care for any of his people ? 
A person of honour asked me, the other day, what he 
[Fielding] could mean, by saying, in his Covent Garden 
Journal, that he had followed Homer and Virgil, in his 
Amelia, I answered, that he was justified in saying 
so, because he must mean Cotton's Virgil Travestied ; 
where the women are drabs, and the men scoundrels." 
This is sheer insolence ; but in regard to the charge of 
"lowness" — that bugbear of the earlier students of 
humanity in the rough — no answer is required save the 
one which Goldsmith made, a few years later, to a 
speech by my Lady Blarney. " There's nothing comes 
out but the most lowest stuff in nature " — says that 
patrician critic. " Not a bit of high life among 



v.] CORRESPONDENCE, 1749-54 119 

them." And Mr. Burchell, very properly, ejaculates 
— " Fudge ! " Nevertheless, it was some time before 
this damaging form of censure ceased to be used and 
listened to. Fielding referred to it more than once in 
Tom Jones, 1 and Goldsmith, whose bailiff scene in The 
Good Natur'd Man was voted to be " uncommonly low," 
does the same in She Stoops to Conquer. Not until 
Sentimental Comedy lay dead or dying, in 1780, was 
Colman able to write, as he did in the Prologue to 
Miss Lee's Chapter of Accidents : — 

" When Fielding, Humour's fav'rite child, appeared, 
Low was the word — a word each author f ear'd, 
Till chac'd at length, by pleasantry's bright ray, 
Nature and mirth resumed their legal sway ; 
And Goldsmith's genius bask'd in open day." 

To return to the Delany correspondence. One of 
Mrs. Delany's youthful friends had been a Miss 
Kirkham, the daughter of a clergyman. She married 
the Eev. John Chapone. One of her daughters, Sally 
Chapone, was practically adopted by the Delanys ; 
and in 1750, when the eldest son, also John Chapone, 
came to London to study law, Mrs. Dewes, Mrs. 
Delany's sister, gave him a letter of introduction to 
Eichardson, with whose North End circle he promptly 
became a favourite. This led to a voluminous cor- 
respondence between his mother and Eichardson (it 
occupies more than one of the huge volumes at South 
Kensington, and is not reprinted by Mrs. Barbauld), 
largely engrossed by a discussion of the status of 
women. The letters are not very fruitful in Eichard- 
soniana. Mrs. Chapone, moreover, clever as she was, 
was not the Mrs. Chapone, famous many years after 

i Vols. iii. 6; iv. 94; and Bk. xii. Ch. v. 



120 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

for her Letters on the Improvement of the Mind. That 
enviable distinction belongs to a young lady who 
married the John Chapone above referred to, and 
whose name was Hester, or, more familiarly, Hecky 
Mulso. She was the daughter of one Thomas Mulso 
of Twywell, a gentleman of Northamptonshire (also 
the home of Harriet Byron 1 ), and must have been 
unusually precocious as a child, since, at the tender 
age of nine, she composed a brief romance entitled The 
Loves ofAmoret and Melissa. Her mother, whose chief 
gift was beauty, discouraged these premature essays. 
But, dying not many years after, she left Hester 
mistress of herself, and of her father's house. She 
contrived to learn French, Italian, and a little Latin ; 
obtained some knowledge of drawing, and won, by her 
beautiful voice, the name of " linnet/' conferred on 
her by Thomas Edwards. Spending her winters in 
London, she became acquainted with Richardson, who 
took a great fancy to a correspondent, who, to use 
Walpole's word, was as " corresponding " as himself. 
"He [Richardson] loved " says Mrs. Barbauld, "to 
draw out her reasoning powers, then beginning to 
unfold themselves. He engaged her in a controversy 
on the measure of filial obedience ; but her part of it, 
with the rest of the letters, was withdrawn from the 
collection after Richardson's death." 2 It was a subject 

*It is possible that she served Richardson in some respects 
as a model. According to Mrs. Delany, Mrs. Donnellan thought 
her " only second-rate as to politeness of manner " and hinted 
that Richardson's shortcomings in high life might be owing 
to his faulty pattern. 

2 Three letters from Miss Mulso to Richardson on this theme 
are included in vol. ii. of her (Mrs. Chapone 's) Works, 1807. 
One runs to 49 pages, the other to 55. 



v.] COKKESPONDENCE, 1749-54 121 

upon which he must have also had other correspond- 
ents, for there is an epistle (from which we have 
already borrowed a quotation) of more than five 
closely printed columns upon this theme in Notes and 
Queries for 24th April 1869, in which, with excursuses 
on Clarissa, and side strokes at Tom Jones, the dis- 
cussion should surely have been exhausted. The lady 
there addressed, however, is not Miss Mulso, but an 

unrevealed " Miss Gr P Eichardson's own epistles 

to Miss Mulso, of which Mrs. Barbauld prints several 
between 1750 and 1757, are not very engrossing ; and 
they are largely occupied by the details of the forth- 
coming Orandison. She does not appear to have 
followed up her childish romance by anything except 
occasional Odes to Mr. Edwards and Miss Carter, one 
of which is preserved in that lady's translation of 
Epictetus, three papers in the third volume of the 
Adventurer ("The Story of Fidelia") and correspond- 
ence. Johnson printed some of her notelets in 
No. 10 of the Rambler. She must have met him 
frequently in her visits to North End, and indeed, 
in one of her letters to Miss Carter, a year or two 
later, gives an account of his bringing blind Miss 
Williams with him to tea. "I was charmed," she 
says, " with Mr. Johnson's behaviour to Mrs. Williams, 
which was like that of a fond father to his daughter." 
Miss Mulso is one of the Eichardson group concerning 
whom one willingly asks for more. She was not one 
of Eichardson's neck-or-nothing flatterers. He even 
described her, playfully of course, as a "little spitfire." 
She has the courage of her opinions : she sees the 
faults of Johnson and Young, and says so; and she 
has a frank and genuine distaste for Fielding (she 



122 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

liked Amelia, but could not away with Captain Booth), 
to which, as it is frank and genuine, we cannot reason- 
ably object. Her attachment to John Chapone, which 
began almost as soon as she met him, was not followed 
by marriage for many years; and when at last, in 
December 1760, they were united, he only lived for a 
short time, surviving Richardson himself, who was 
much attached to him, for little more than two months. 
After this, she passes out of the scope of this memoir, 
although she lived to become the author of the once 
famous Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, the 
commended of Queen Charlotte, and the "admirable 
Mrs. Chapone" of the more serious Bas Bleus. Ap- 
parently she did not inherit her mother's personal 
attractions, or else lost them in advanced age. " She 
concealed very superior attainments and extensive 
knowledge " — says the uncompromising Wraxall — 
" under one of the most repulsive exteriors that any 
woman ever possessed." Gallantry might be disposed 
to regard this simply as the verdict of an unsym- 
pathetic male. But it is amply confirmed, as regards 
the lack of beauty, by Fanny Burney's sister Charlotte, 
who met Mrs. Chapone in 1782 at the house of that 
lady's relative, the genial and musical Dean of 
Winchester, Dr. Newton Ogle. "She looked less 
forbidding than usual," says this plain-spoken young 
lady ; " but she is deadly ugly, to be sure — such African 
nose and lips, and such a clunch figure ! " ("Clunch" is 
a Burney word, meaning "thick-set," or "stumpy.") 
Fanny Burney herself is much kinder. "Mrs. Cha- 
pone ... is the most superiorly unaffected creature 
you can conceive, and full of agremens from good sense, 
talents, and conversational powers, in defiance of age, 



v.] CORRESPONDENCE, 1749-54 123 

infirmities, and uncommon ugliness. I really love as 
well as admire and esteem her." 

North End, besides being a nursery of sentiment, 
must also have been a hotbed of the affections, for 
when Miss Mulso was married to John Chapone, her 
brother Edward Mulso was simultaneously united to 
the "amiable Pressy," otherwise Miss Prescott, another 
frequenter of the Eichardsonian circle. Mr. Thomas 
Mulso, the elder, " unwilling to protract [? postpone] 
the union of two of his children, so long and so un- 
alterably attached as his daughter to Mr. Chapone, 
and his eldest son to Miss Prescott, arranged his affairs 
so as to admit of their both being married on the 
same day." Nor was this the only affair of the kind 
which seems to have gone on under Eichardson's 
fostering eye. At South Kensington there are traces 
of the poetical philanderings of a Corydon and Stella 
whose loves are not running smoothly, despite the 
ministrations of a " sage Palemon " whose connection 
with a "grotto" and a "moral page" makes it im- 
possible not to identify him with the author of Clarissa. 

" To good Palemon's Grotto fly ; 

For all distress' d, Asylum kind, 

Where every Sickness of the Mind 
Sage Palemon knows [how] to heal, 

And soothing Counsel to reveal, 

Advice in Fancy's Garb arrays, 

Instruction with Delight conveys ; 

Mends every Heart that hears his moral Page, 

Adapted well to every State and Age. ' ' 

The Stella of this very pedestrian idyl — the poem 
itself is, of course, an Ode — was Miss Susannah High- 
more, daughter of the painter Joseph Highmore, 



124 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

dwelling at the Sign of the Two Lions in Holborn 
Row, Lincoln's Inn Fields. Highinore, to whom we 
owe so many likenesses of Richardson, was an artist 
whose fame has long been eclipsed by that of his 
greater contemporaries, but his reputation is now 
rising daily. In 1744 he had painted twelve scenes 
from Pamela, prints from which were advertised in 
April of the following year. These scenes were 
probably those decorations of Ranelagh to which 
Mrs. Haywood refers in her story of Jenny and Jemmy 
Jessamy. He had also painted Clarissa " in the 
Vandyke taste and dress " favoured by Gray and 
Horace Walpole ; and he made a study of the Harlowe 
family from the beginning of the novel. 1 In Mrs. 
Barbauld's fifth volume there is an Ode to him by 
Thomas Mulso, prompted by his picture of Richard- 
son, no doubt the full-length in the National Portrait 
Gallery, which is dated 1750. 

* ' Well can thy running pencil trace 
The comely features of his honest face, 
Well canst thou suffuse his eye, 
With sense and soft humanity ; 
Good humour too the dimpled cheek, 
And pleasing countenance bespeak." 

Mr. Highmore, however, does not seem to have re- 
garded his daughter's Corydon with the same favour 
as did the " sage Palemon." Yet Mr. John Duncombe, 
Junior, was not without distinction. He had a literary 
father who had written a couple of tragedies ; and he 
himself was a Cambridge man, who like the younger 
Mulso had contributed his paper to the World of 

iThis picture, in 1780, belonged to T. W. Payler of Ileden 
in Kent. 



v.] CORRESPONDENCE, 1749-54 125 

Edward Moore — that "bow of Ulysses in which it was 
the fashion for men of rank and genius to try their 
strength." By 1753 he had become the Keverend, and 
in the following year published The Feminead; or, 
Female Genius, which, notwithstanding the objection of 
honest Thomas Edwards to " omne quod exit in ad" is 
not without interest, especially as, among the " learned 
ladies " who constitute its theme, it celebrates some of 
the bright, particular stars of the North End con- 
stellation. The " good Palemon " naturally comes very 
early to the front, and without disguise, in this artless 
performance, which may still be read at large in the 
fourth volume of Pearch's collection : — 

" Thou, who so oft with pleas'd, but anxious care, 
Hast watch 1 d the dawning genius of the fair, 
With wonted smiles wilt hear thy friend display 
The various graces of the female lay \ 
Studious from Folly's yoke their mind to free, 
And aid the generous cause espous'd by thee." 

Then, beginning with the "matchless Orinda" (Mrs. 
Katherine Phillips), and Anne, Countess of Winchilsea, 
the writer, not without due reprobation of your Behns 
and Manleys (and even Pilkingtons), progresses to what 
probably was the prime object of his unpremeditated 
effort, praise of Miss Carter, Miss Earrer of the Ode to 
Cynthia, Miss " Delia " Mulso, and Miss " Eugenia " 
Highmore, — "the muse's pupil from her tend'rest 
years " : — 

" Improving tasks her peaceful hours beguile, 
The sister arts on all her labours smile, 
And while the Nine their votary inspire, 
1 One dips the pencil and one strings the lyre,' * 

1 This is line 70 of Pope's Epistle to Mr. Jervas. 



126 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

O may her life's clear current smoothly glide, 
Unruffled by misfortune's boist'rous tide, 
So while the charmer leads her blameless days 
With that content which she so well displays, 
Her own Honoria we in her shall view, 
And think her allegoric vision true." 

The last reference — a note informs us — is to "an 
ingenious allegory " by Miss Highmore, in which " two 
pilgrims, Fidelio and Honoria, after a fruitless search 
for the palace of Happiness, are at last conducted to 
the house of Content." 

It was not until just before Eichardson's death that 
John Duncombe and Susannah Highmore arrived at 
that temple of Content over the door of which is 
written Matrimony. They were married in April 
1761, and, in the future into which we need not follow 
them, lived happily for some three-and-twenty years. 
Mrs. Barbauld prints some of the letters which passed 
between Eichardson and his young friend (Miss High- 
more was of course a supplementary daughter) ; but 
with the exception of the invitation to Tunbridge 
Wells quoted in the last chapter, they are not of 
absorbing interest. One of them, which refers to the 
young lady's kindness for Mr. Duncombe, displays a 
good deal of that teasing raillery in which Eichardson 
seems to have excelled, 1 and incidentally he gives it a 
better name than he knew when he says that Mr. 
Edwards accuses him of loving like "Polly" in the 
Beggar's Opera to " tarantalise " — a word which, for 
compound expressiveness, might have been invented by 
the author of Alice in Wonderland. He confirms what 

i "My Pen is sometimes a very perverse one, and loves to 
tease and amuse," — he writes to Lady Bradshaigh in October 
1753. 



v.] CORRESPONDENCE, 1749-54 127 

he had once written to Young as to his preference for 
writing over reading. " What stores of knowledge do 
I lose, by my incapacity of reading, and by my having 
used myself to write, till I can do nothing else, nor 
hardly that." Elsewhere he says, " I don't wonder you 
are in such raptures with Spenser ! What an imagina- 
tion ! What an invention ! What painting ! What 
colouring displayed throughout the works of that 
admirable author ! and yet for want of time, or oppor- 
tunity, I have not read his Fairy Queen through in 
series, or at a heat, as I may call it " — which last 
words oddly suggest Mr. Silas Wegg on The Decline 
and Fall. " I haven't been not to say right slap through 
him, very lately," — are the words of that wooden- 
legged impostor. Eichardson was no impostor; but 
it may fairly be doubted, whether he too had ever been 
in, as Macaulay puts it, " at the death of the Blatant 
Beast." In another letter he speaks of entertaining 
Mrs. Donnellan (" a woman of fine parts, and great 
politeness ") with Miss Sutton at breakfast ; and later, 
in a Pepysian passage, draws a picture of old Cibber 
reciting his own translations from Horace on a hot day, 
" till he was in a breathing, and wiped and acted like 
anything, and everybody was pleased." A further 
passage (from a letter to Mr. Duncombe) shows that 
he is meditating a change of residence ; and what is 
more, that he has already selected a new house. " On 
Parson's Green, between Chelsea and Fulham (pro- 
pitious be the name of the place !), on the side of the 
King's Eoad to Fulham, Putney, Eichmond, etc., have 
I pitched, at last, my tent. There is a porch at the 
door (an old monastery-like house) in which my friends, 
such even as will not come on purpose, will find it 



128 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

difficult, as they pass by, to avoid seeing the old man, 
who, if he lives, proposes often in it to reconnoitre the 
Green, and watch for them." This letter is dated 
24th August 1754. But, as we shall see, it was not 
until the end of October, that he actually took up 
residence in his new home. 

Of the remaining letter- writers for this period, with 
one exception, none is of great importance. Mrs. 
Barbauld prints a number of epistles to and from an 
Irish clergyman named Skelton, who helped Eichard- 
son to get in his Irish debts ; but they have little 
biographical interest. Of the rest, a letter to a Mr. 
Def reval of Paris * in January 1751, when the extended 
edition of Clarissa was at press, contains some personal 
traits. Eichardson complains of the correspondence 
which the book has brought upon him, — of his ner- 
vous infirmities that " time mends not." " Clarissa" 
he says, " has almost killed me. You know how my 
business engages me. You know by what snatches of 
time I write, that I may not neglect that, and that I 
may preserve that independency which is the comfort 
of my life. I never sought out of myself for patrons. 
My own industry, and God's providence, have been my 
whole reliance." In the Postscript comes a thrust at 
Tom Jones. " Tom Jones is a dissolute book. Its run 
is over, even with us. Is it true, that Prance has 
virtue enough to refuse a licence for such a profligate 
performance ? " This story has the support of Scott, 2 

!Mr. J. B. Defreval was the author of the first commenda- 
tory letter in the first edition of Pamela, which bears the ini- 
tials " J. B. D. F." 

2 In all probability Scott's authority was Watson's Life of 
Fielding, 1807, p. 107, where it is stated that " the Council of 
State of France . . . issued an arret, suppressing the publica- 



v.] CORRESPONDENCE, 1749-54 129 

who says that " French delicacy, which, on so many 
occasions, has strained at a gnat, and swallowed a 
camel, by an arr£t prohibited the circulation of a 
bungling abridgement of De la Place, entitled a trans- 
lation." But Mr. Def reval, in his reply to Eichardson, 
does not believe it. " I am sorry to say it, but you do 
my countrymen more honour than they truly deserve, 
in surmising that they had virtue enough to refuse a 
licence to Tom Jones : I think it a profligate perform- 
ance upon your pronouncing it such [!], for I have 
never read the piece, though much extolled ; but it has 
had a vast run here this good while, and considering 
how things go on, I don't believe there is now a book 
dissolute enough to be refused admittance among us, 
since pieces of the worst tendency are sure of getting 
it by hook or by crook." 

Eef erence was made above to one among Eichardson' s 
correspondents whose letters were of rather more 
importance than those just mentioned. This was the 
unknown admirer, who in her communications adopted 
the name of " Mrs. Belfour." She continued to write 
to Eichardson even after her disappointment in regard 
to the ending of Clarissa; and he naturally began to 
be somewhat curious about the position and personal 
appearance of a lady who was evidently a reader after 
his own heart, and as a writer so indefatigable that 
she did not know when to leave off. She announced 
that when she came to town she would see him 
unknown to himself ; and he replied by endeavouring 

tion and sale of it" [i.e. De la Place's version]. Or it may have 
been the following: — " .*. The newspapers inform us, that the 
celebrated history of Tom Jones has been suppressed in France 
as an immoral work" (Monthly Review, 1750, ii. p. 432). 

K 



130 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

to induce her to visit North End. A good deal of 
finessing ensued on both sides : — on his, to identify 
the lady at certain places where she announced that 
she would be ; on hers, to see him without being seen. 
In order that she might make no possible mistake in 
this preliminary investigation, he gave her a detailed 
description of himself which has long been recognised 
as a faithful picture. " I go thro' the Park once or 
twice a week to my little retirement ; but I will for 
a week together be in it every day three or four 
hours, at your command, till you tell me you have 
seen a person who answers to this description, namely, 
Short, rather plump than emaciated, notwithstanding 
his complaints : about five foot five inches : fair wig; 
lightish cloth coat, all black besides : one hand gener- 
ally in his bosom, the other a cane in it, which he 
leans upon under the skirts of his coat usually, that it 
may imperceptibly serve as a support, when attacked 
by sudden tremors or startings, and dizziness . . . look- 
ing directly foreright, as passers-by would imagine ; 
but observing all that stirs on either hand, of him 
without moving his short neck ; hardly ever turning 
back: of a light-brown complexion; teeth not yet 
failing him ; smoothish faced and ruddy cheeked : at 
sometimes looking to be about sixty-five, at other 
times much younger : a regular even pace, stealing 
away ground, rather than seeming to rid it: a gray 
eye, too often overclouded by mistinesses from the 
head : by chance lively ; very lively it will be, if he 
have hope of seeing a lady whom he loves and 
honours : his eye always on the ladies ; if they have 
very large hoops, he looks down and supercilious, and 
as if he would be thought wise, but perhaps the sillier 



v.] CORRESPONDENCE, 1749-54 131 

for that: as he approaches a lady, his eye is never 
fixed first upon her face, but upon her feet, and thence 
he raises it up, pretty quickly for a dull eye ; and one 
would think (if we thought him at all worthy of 
observation) that from her air and (the last beheld) 
her face, he sets her down in his mind as so or so, and 
then passes on to the next object he meets ; only then 
looking back, if he greatly likes or dislikes, as if he 
would see if the lady appear to be all of a piece, in 
the one light or in the other." 

In Mrs. Belfour's reply to this, which is dated 16th 
December 1749, she is still deliberating. She cannot 
accept the invitation to North End. But she has sent 
his description to a friend. The description of the 
friend, however, is evidently a description of herself. 
" She is middle-aged, middle-sized, a degree above 
plump, brown as an oak wainscot, a good deal of 
country red in her cheeks ; altogether a plain woman, 
but nothing remarkably forbidding." " She will attend 
the Park every fine warm day, between the hours of 
one and two." Between the hours of one and two 
accordingly we must imagine Bichardson offering him- 
self for inspection. But " Mrs. Belf our," too, possesses 
the gift of "tarantalising." By some accident, or 
whim of the sender, he did not receive her letter of 
the 16th December until Saturday, the 30th. On the 
following Sunday, having been prevented by what 
almost seems an opportune indisposition from going 
to North End, he went into the Park with nothing 
but a sea-biscuit in his pocket, in hopes of seeing his 
Incognita. On the Saturday following (the 6th Jan.) 
he " walked backwards and forwards in the Mall till 
past her friend's time of being there," and was mani- 



132 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap, 

festly a little put out. Nevertheless he continues to 
perambulate the Mall and Constitution Hill, wearying 
his daughter Patty, and her friend Miss Collier, by the 
assiduity of his search. At last, on February the 17th, 
she passes him four times without revealing herself. 
" I knew you," she writes a week later, " by your own 
description, at least three hundred yards off, walking 
in the Park between the trees and the Mall. . . . You 
looked at me every time we passed; but I put on 
so unconcerned a countenance, that I am almost sure 
I deceived you." It was March, nevertheless, before 
they met. But before that time, and indeed before 
the occurrence just referred to, Eichardson had dis- 
covered his correspondent's real name. She had 
visited Highmore's studio to see the Clarissa pic- 
tures, and Highmore's inquisitive French servant 
had managed to ascertain who she was. 

She proved to be the wife of Sir Eoger Bradshaigh 
of Haigh, near Wigan, in Lancashire, a gentleman of 
much landed property in the coal country, but not 
rich. She was childless, devoted to her husband ; and, 
says Mrs. Barbauld, "bore the character of a most 
worthy, pious and charitable woman," but rather 
hearty and active than " polished." Indeed, though 
she was fairly well read and intelligent, she seems to 
have been needlessly unwilling to incur the reproach 
of exceptional learning. Especially was she anxious 
not to be regarded as the correspondent of a live 
author. She begs Eichardson on no account to make 
her name public, and to engage Mr. Highmore, or 
whoever may be in the secret, to use a like discretion. 
" Though I glory in it myself, and have with pride 
confessed it to some select friends, yet, I know, by 



v.] CORRESPONDENCE, 1749-54 133 

the ill-judging and the envious, I should be thought 
conceited, and too self-sufficient, in corresponding 
with one so far my superior in understanding, and 
an author." She carried this to such an extent that 
when later Richardson sent her his portrait — a por- 
trait which is said still to be preserved by the family 
— she altered the name above the frame from Richard- 
son to Dickenson, that the questions asked her about 
her distant friend might not cause embarrassment or 
betray her unwittingly. 

In Mrs. Barbauld's collection, Lady Bradshaigh's 
correspondence under her own name and that of 
" Mrs. Belfour " occupies rather more than a volume 
and a half, and even this does not include many of 
the letters at South Kensington. " They," says Mrs. 
Barbauld rather grimly, " together with Richardson's 
answers, would alone make several volumes, I believe 
as many as the whole of this publication [i.e. six], a 
proof, by the way, that the bookseller and the editor 
have had some mercy on the public." It would be 
idle, in the narrower space available here, to "attempt 
to give any adequate account of this very extensive 
material. Some quotations have already been made in 
connection with Clarissa; others will naturally be made 
in speaking of Sir Charles Grandison. And it must 
be confessed that the matter on either side is scarcely 
enthralling. When the progress of either Clarissa or 
its successor is not under consideration, the interest 
flags appreciably. Here and there, however, are to 
be found items of literary intelligence. In one case 
Lady Bradshaigh refers to a letter on the change in the 
manners of women, which Richardson had addressed 
to the Rambler (No. 97, for 19th February 1751), in 



134 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

order to tell him that, as it was so much better written 
than the other papers, a friend had supposed it from 
the pen of some one concerned in the Spectators. 
Johnson, who had praised the writer in his introduc- 
tory words by the memorable commendation that he 
had " enlarged the knowledge of human nature, and 
taught the passions to move at the command of 
virtue," would probably not have endorsed this opinion 
as to style. It seems, however, to be a fact that 
none of Johnson's own efforts had so large a sale as 
Richardson's contribution. Another thing discussed 
is Lord Orrery's Remarks on Swift, to which Richard- 
son, having met His Lordship in Millar's shop and 
exchanged civilities, is naturally well disposed. It 
was Orrery who first started the story of Swift's 
marriage to Stella ; and it is interesting to notice that 
Richardson professes to have heard of the marriage 
as " a certain truth " long before Orrery had written. 
And he adds that his informant was a lady of good- 
ness, no enemy but to what was bad in Swift, — a 
description which may perhaps stand for Mrs. Delany. 1 
In a later letter of 24th February 1753, there is an 
unusual amount of bookish chit-chat. The rival 
Ciceros of Cibber and Conyers Middleton are com- 
pared ; and there is mention of The Female Quixote, 
whose authoress, Charlotte Lenox, was often a visitor 
at North End, and had complimented Clarissa in type, 
a kindness which the " admirable Writer" thereof 
affects to deprecate. Another reference is to Moore's 

1 Her husband believed in it. " Your account of his [Swift's] 
marriage," he says to Orrery, " is, I am satisfied, true" 
(Observations upon Lord Orrery's Remarks on the Life and 
Writings of Dr. Jonathan Swift, 1754, p. 53). 



v.] CORRESPONDENCE, 1749-54 135 

Gamester, which Eichardson had heard Garrick read ; 
and there is an expression of heartfelt regret that 
Young's tragedy of The Brothers should be hopelessly 
overshadowed by the Earl of Essex, another tragedy 
by Lord Chesterfield's bricklayer poet, Henry Jones. 
But the most interesting passage of this letter refers 
to the foreign versions of the writer's works. " My 
vanity . . . has been raised by a present sent me of 
a translation of Clarissa, in the German language, in 
eight volumes, from the celebrated Dr. Haller, Vice- 
Chancellor of the University of Gottingen ; and by 
two volumes neatly printed, of the same, in Dutch, 
by an eminent hand, M. Stinstra, of Haarlingen, in 
Friesland, who is going on with the translation, two 
volumes at a time; also by a present of the same 
work in twelve thin volumes in French, translated by 
the Abbe Prevost, author of the Dean of Colerain, and 
other pieces. But this gentleman has thought fit to 
omit some of the most affecting parts ; as the death 
of Belton ; Miss Howe's lamentation over the corpse of 
her friend ; Sinclair's death and remorse ; and many 
of the letters (though with some commendations) that 
passed between Lovelace and Belford, after Clarissa's 
death, with some apologies, that, a lady, who under- 
stands the language says, imply a reflexion on his 
nation. 1 He treats the story as a true one; and 
says, in one place, that the English editor has often 
sacrificed his story to moral instructions, warnings, 
etc. — the very motive with me, of the story's being 

lu Who understands the language" — is proof that Richard- 
son read no French. Prevost, it may be added, did not, as we 
shall see (post p. 201 n.), omit the " reflexion on his nation" 
contained in the prefatory letters to Pamela, 



136 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

written at all." This almost reads as if this was 
Richardson's first communication with Prevost. But 
the Preface to the French version of Pamela says 
distinctly that that version had made "avec la 
participation de l'auteur, qui a eu la bonte de nous 
fournir un petit nombre d' additions et de corrections " 
— as well as some " portraits " of the characters. 

Lady Bradshaigh, besides being the most assiduous, 
is also the last of Richardson's correspondents. In- 
deed her final letter is dated after his death, and is 
addressed to one of his married daughters, Mrs. 
Bridgen. She herself survived until 1789, when she 
died at the age of eighty. But there must have been 
many visitors to the hospitable house at North End 
who do not figure among the writers of letters, or 
only figure rarely. The already-mentioned Mrs. 
Charlotte Lenox, for instance, was often there, and 
could scarcely recall an occasion upon which "her 
host had not rehearsed at least one, but probably two 
or three voluminous letters, if he found her in the 
humour of listening with attention." Miss Carter 
(whose Ode on Wisdom Richardson had boldly annexed 
while in manuscript for the second volume of Clarissa) 
and her friend, Miss Talbot, again, were, no doubt, 
frequently breakfast guests, like Miss Sutton and 
Mrs. Donnellan. The men visitors were fewer. But 
Cibber, as we have seen, came occasionally, and doubt- 
less Speaker Onslow, as well as Thomas Edwards 
and Dr. Young. Johnson, we know, visited at both 
houses, and Hogarth. Indeed, it was under Richard- 
son's roof that the Painter first saw the Lexicographer. 
In 1753, immediately after the execution of Dr. 
Archibald Cameron, for complicity in the '45, Hogarth 



v.] CORRESPONDENCE, 1749-54 137 

and Richardson were discussing that event. There 
was another person standing at a winded in the 
room, shaking his head, and rolling himself about in 
a ridiculous manner. Hogarth took him for some 
one of defective intelligence, placed under his friend's 
care. But presently the figure lumbered forward, and 
burst into an animated invective against George the 
Second, whose clemency had been in question, dis- 
playing such an unexpected power of oratory that 
the painter thought him inspired. He often heard 
the great man afterwards, but at this meeting, it is 
expressly stated, they were not made known to one 
another. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE HISTORY OF SIR CHARLES GRANDISON 

In the first chapter of this book, mention was made 
of a certain grotto or summer-house in the garden at 
North End, where Eichardson was in the habit of 
reading his productions to a select circle of admirers. 
Miss Susannah Highmore, who inherited something 
of her father's talent, has left a little picture of one 
of these sessions. Whether the fair artist, after the 
fashion of the draughtsmen of her day, has yielded 
overmuch to the seductions of perspective, we know 
not ; but what she depicts is a rather spacious chamber 
entered from without by two descending steps, so that 
its floor would appear to be slightly below the level 
of the ground. It is scantly furnished, but extensive 
enough to accommodate a party of seven, that is, in 
addition to the author, three ladies and three gentle- 
men. Eichardson, "in his usual morning dress," a 
velvet cap, and the night- or dressing-gown of the 
period, sits to the left with crossed legs (as in Cham- 
berlin's portrait), intent upon the latest instalment 
of the manuscript of Grandison. To his left is Mr. 
Mulso, senior ; and further still to the left, on a seat 
by the door, his son, Mr. Edward Mulso. At the 
opposite side of the apartment, grouped round a 
table, are the remainder of the company. Miss 

138 



ch. vi.] HISTOBY OF SIB CRABLES GBANDISON 139 

Mulso, a dignified young woman, whose figure here, 
at all events, does not deserve the depreciatory 
epithet which Charlotte Burney bestowed upon it, 
comes first. Next to Miss Mulso is Miss Prescott, 
who, as we know, subsequently became Mrs. Edward 
Mulso; and next to Miss Prescott, the Eev. John 
Duncombe, who is taking a pinch of snuff with a 
gesture which would do credit to Chesterfield him- 
self. By him sits the damsel of his choice, the artist, 
Miss Highmore. The ladies wear sacques, hoops (for 
the nonce disposed over their seats), and Pamela hats ; 
the gentlemen, in the ordinary costume of the day, 
are elegantly posed in attitudes of attention. 

The little picture bears no date. But it must have been 
executed not long before July 1751, as it is mentioned 
in a letter addressed at that time by Miss Mulso to 
Miss Highmore, referring to " the dear circle at North 
End, which your pencil so prettily described. You do 
not know," says the future Mrs. Chapone, to whom we 
must assume that the drawing once belonged, " how 
much pleasure I take in surveying that sketch, nor 
how often I contemplate every figure in it, and recall 
the delights of that day." x Erom these last words it 
would appear that this particular reading was a some- 
what exceptional one. But, according to Mrs. Barbauld, 
it was Bichardson's practice to write in the grotto 
before the family were up, communicating afterwards 
to the party at breakfast the daily advance of his 

iMiss Mulso, as already stated, was herself an amateur 
artist. " I had great pleasure in seeing in Mr. Richardson's 
hands an exceeding like picture of you, drawn hy Miss Mulso 
this last summer — Do not be scandalised ; he cannot possibly 
wear it in his snuff-box " {Miss Talbot to Mrs. Carter, 12th 
August 1756). 



140 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

labours. "Then/' says Mrs. Barbauld, in an oft- 
quoted passage, " began the criticisms, the pleadings, 
for Harriet Byron or Clementina; every turn and 
every incident was eagerly canvassed, and the author 
enjoyed the benefit of knowing beforehand how his 
situations would strike." It was here also that he 
studied his guests, of whom he always had a working 
assortment on hand, whose own little partialities and 
entanglements were frequently developed under his 
eye, " becoming the subject of grave advice or lively 
raillery." " I have often sat by in company," he tells 
a correspondent, " and been silently pleased with the 
opportunity given me, by different arguers, of looking 
into the hearts of some of them, through windows that 
at other times have been closed." It is clear that he 
was always using his "flower-garden of ladies " either 
as critics of his work, or as object-lessons in sensibility. 
"You cannot imagine, Madam," he says, in another 
letter to a different person, " how much the Characters 
of Clarissa, of Miss Howe, of Lovelace, of Mr. Hick- 
man, have let me into the Hearts and Souls of my 
Acquaintance of both Sexes, some of which, those of 
Sophia and Tom Jones, have greatly confirmed." 

Clarissa had been published in 1747-48, and Tom 
Jones in 1749. Whether Sir Charles Grandison would 
have been written at all if Tom Jones had never existed, 
is a speculation upon which it would now be fruitless 
to enter, although it is probable that there is more 
connection between the two than is generally imagined. 
Tom Jones, at all events, was a hero with many of the 
other sex; and it is equally certain that he was not 
at all a hero after Bichardson's pattern. It is quite 
in the nature of things that Bichardson should think 



vi.] HIS TOBY OF SIB CHABLES GBANDISON 141 

himself capable of producing a better model. More- 
over, lie had gained strength enormously. When he 
wrote Pamela, his native genius for minute analysis 
was possibly as strong as it was when he wrote Clarissa; 
but his full knowledge of his own gifts was still to 
come, his powers were untrained, and his experience 
was narrow and limited. His books had now made 
him many friends ; and he had around him a circle of 
admirers, who were far more capable of stimulating 
his invention, and directing his efforts, than the 
"worthy-hearted wife" and her young lady friend, 
who, in his little writing-closet at Salisbury Court, 
had listened daily to the story of the distresses of 
Pamela Andrews. And it was the peculiarity of his 
diffident, half-educated nature, that he required the 
constant encouragement of a somewhat exaggerated 
applause. In the strong wind of a robust criticism his 
inventive faculties would have been shrivelled, and his 
imagination dried up ; but in the warm-winged adula- 
tion of the little consistory he gathered about him, he 
expanded, bloomed, and nourished. Their suggestions 
served to recruit and fructify his easily-fatigued fancy, 
and although his advisers probably imagined that 
they were helping him a good deal more than he 
would have allowed, there can be no doubt that they 
did afford material aid. With the plot of another 
Clarissa they were incapable of supplying him ; but 
when he sat down to write Sir Charles Grandison, he 
was far better equipped for a fresh undertaking than 
he had ever been before. 

We begin to hear of Sir Charles Grandison at the 
close of 1749, when Lady Bradshaigh, still masquer- 
ading as "Mrs. Belfour," urges Eichardson to give 



142 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

the world his idea of a good man and fine gentleman 
combined. In his reply, he demurs and hesitates. He 
has doubts as to drawing such a character, looking to 
the favour shown to Lovelace, and the ill-reception 
accorded to the excellent but unattractive Hickman of 
his earlier book. The question comes again to the 
front in June of the following year. He has been 
visited at North End by Mrs. Donnellan and Miss 
Sutton, "both very intimate with one Clarissa Harlowe : 
and both extremely earnest with him to give them a 
good man." The good man, it is understood, is to be 
wonderfully polite, but no Hickman. " How can we 
hope that ladies will not think a good man a tame 
man ? " he asks Miss Highmore. When Mrs. Donnellan 
gets back to Epsom, in acknowledging the Meditations, 
and other books which Richardson has sent to her, she 
returns to the subject. "I fancy," she says, "if you 
would draw a fine man, as you have a woman, the 
young ladies would become your correspondents more 
readily." Erom the reply, the idea is evidently taking 
shape in Richardson's mind. Will not the ladies tell 
him what they want ? What is the ideal man to do, 
and what is he not to do ? — in order to acquire and 
maintain an exemplary character. It would be merely 
futile to avoid leading him into difficulties, such as 
challenges, etc. (to which as a good man he would be 
particularly exposed), simply because he could not, 
consistently with his character, be honourably extri- 
cated from such a position. Then ought he not to 
have great distresses, and be made happy at last, at 
least as far as this life is concerned? The young 
ladies must help him to make his hero. " It is more 
in the power of young ladies than they seem to 



vi.] HISTORY OF SIR CHARLES GRANDISON 143 

imagine, to make a fine man." Nevertheless he fears 
— very much fears — that the fine man when made, 
would not have the suffrages of the sex unless he had 
more of Lovelace than of Hickman in his composition. 

In his next letter, to Mrs. Delany's sister, Mrs. 
Dewes, he seems to imply that he had already 
attempted a beginning since he refers to the subject — 
" two or three letters of which you saw." But he con- 
tinues to be doubtful. His business is engrossing; 
his time of life too advanced ; the task proposed, above 
all, exceptionally arduous. How shall he draw — he 
asks once more — a man that good men would approve, 
and that the young ladies of the age would think 
amiable ? Mrs. Donnellan endeavours to get over or 
round the duelling difficulty by suggesting that the 
hero's fighting should have been done before the 
reader makes his acquaintance, so that, his courage 
having been proved beyond question, he should be 
immune from insult. Some faults he must have, she 
admits — some failings from passion, " but must be 
soon recovered by reason and religion." " In short," 
she adds, " he must have more of Miss Howe than of 
Clarissa" — a sentiment which almost justifies the 
pleasant jibe that Sir Charles Grandison is one of 
the author's chief feminine characters. And so the 
discussion goes on, without advancing greatly. Noth- 
ing, admits Mrs. Delany, is "more difficult than to 
make him brave, and avoid duelling, that reigning 
curse." " But how to ward off a challenge, and pre- 
serve his character, is a task only to be undertaken 
by the author of Clarissa" 

Then there are other obstacles, — for example, the 
delineation of fashionable society. How can that be 



144 SAMUEL RICHAKDSON [chap. 

compassed? "How should I," writes Richardson to 
Mrs. Dewes, " a very ordinary man, unlearned, all my 
early years employed to get a mechanic business for a 
livelihood [a business which, he writes elsewhere, still 
sometimes employs him eighteen hours out of the 
twenty-four] . . . touch those subjects as they require, 
the scenes, most of them, in high life." Mrs. Donnellan, 
to whom he appeals, is not very practically helpful. 
" You are very humble in desiring help and scenes to 
be given you. Indeed the manners of high and 
fashionable life consist in a sort of routine, as the 
French call it, which varies so often, that it must be 
catched flying." l " The present turn," she adds, " is 
taste " ; and she goes on to quote Mrs. Montagu on 
Foote's new farce with that title, then [1752] acting 
at Drury Lane. " Taste," she considers, " would be a 
very proper subject for Sir Charles Grandison to 
expatiate on." In a letter to Lady .Bradshaigh 
another difficulty is revealed. " I own that a good 
woman is my favourite character, and that I can do 
twenty agreeable things for her, none of which would 
appear in a striking light in a man." Yet, in spite of 
all these drawbacks, the book seems to be insensibly 
making way. Before the end of 1751 he had sent a 
sketch to Mrs. Donnellan ; and by the middle of the 
following year, it has advanced considerably. " The 
good man "... he writes, " is grown under my hands 

1 Mrs. Donnellan is here, of course, referring, not to that 
sort of good breeding which, as Scott says, is " natural and 
unchangeable," but to that other, which, "consisting of an ac- 
quaintance with the evanescent manners and fashions of the 
day, is merely conventional, and is perpetually changing, like 
the modes of dress observed in the same circles" (Lives of the 
Novelists, 1825, ii. 62). 



vi.] HIS TOBY OF SIB CIIABLES GBANDISON 145 

from a thin gentleman, as I designed him, to a gigantic 
bulk. And there are so many things that may be 
done, and said, and written by a common man that 
cannot by a good man, that delicacies arise on deli- 
cacies. " . . . "I have, however, written a great deal, 
thro' an encrease of my nervous malady, and a business 
that is enough to engage my whole attention: how 
well, is another question. But if it be likely to dis- 
grace what I have done, it will never see the light. 
Hitherto it has not been disapproved of by some 
people of judgment, who have seen parts of it. And 
this I can say, I borrow not from anybody, no, not 
from myself ; and I think whatever it wants, it has 
variety." 

After this fashion, between speculations whether his 
good man should drink, and how much; appeals to 
Miss Sutton for a " racketing conversation," piping 
hot from high life; threats to Miss Mulso that he 
would give the book a "bad ending" (which cause 
that excitable critic to rave and execrate him), and 
lamentings over his own hypochondria and the illness 
of his daughter Anne — the new novel proceeds, and in- 
creases apace. At last, in November 1753, between the 
Stage Coach and the History of Lucy Wellers, appeared 
in the Gentleman's Magazine, an announcement, of the 
publication in 12° of the first four volumes of the 
History of Sir Charles Grandison : in a Series of Letters 
published from the Originals. — By the Editor of Pamela 
and Clarissa, London : Printed for S. Richardson, and 
sold by Dodsley in Pall Mall and others. In December, 
the month in which Hogarth published his Analysis of 
Beauty, followed two more volumes ; and in March 
1754, when Garrick had issued his Ode to Pelham, and 



146 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

Fielding was lying ill at Bow Street, the book was 
completed by a seventh and final volume. Con- 
currently with this seven volume duodecimo edition was 
issued a six volume edition in octavo. The whole of 
the work in this case came out within five months, 
whereas the publication of Clarissa had extended over 
a year. But the volumes, or part of them, must have 
been in print before November 1753, as Johnson 
acknowledged the receipt of some of them, probably 
the first four, in September. 1 " It is a kind of tyran- 
nical kindness/' he says, on the 26th, " to give only so 
much at a time, as makes more longed for; but that 
[he added graciously] will probably be thought, even 
of the whole, when you have given it." He is too 
honest, however, not to observe upon the Preface, in 
which Eichardson, while in one place practically 
admitting the authorship of the book, says in another 
— " How such remarkable collections of private letters 
fell into the editor's hand he hopes the reader will 
not think it very necessary to enquire." Johnson's 
comment upon this is thoroughly characteristic. " If 
you were to require my opinion which part [in the 

i From a letter to Miss Talbot, dated 21 Sept. 1753, 
Miss Carter had received them still earlier. " Mr. Richardson 
has been so good as to send four volumes of his most charming 
work. . . . Everybody, I am sure, wiU be struck with the 
advantageous difference of the language, though but few can 
observe it with the peculiar pleasure that I do." These last 
words lead Miss Carter's editor to suggest that Miss Talbot 
had revised the book. (Carter's Letters, 1819 (3rd ed.), ii. 27-9.) 
But Lady Bradshaigh read part of it in manuscript, and in 
one of his letters to that lady, Richardson says of the volumes 
— " Are not their Being owing more to you, than to any other 
one Person in the World ? ' ' Clearly Sir Charles must have had 
many sponsors. 



vi.] HISTOBY OF SIB CHABLES GBANDISON 147 

preface] should be changed, I should be inclined to 
the suppression of that part which seems to disclaim 
the composition. 1 What is modesty, if it deserts from 
truth ? Of what use is the disguise by which nothing 
is concealed ? You must forgive this, because it is 
meant well." Eichardson no doubt took the hint, for 
the offending words are not to be found in the exist- 
ing preface to the novel. 

Although there is less plot in Sir Charles Grandison 
than in Clarissa, there is a much larger list of charac- 
ters, whom the author has oddly grouped as Men, 
Women, and Italians, — a plan which recalls Lady 
Mary's distribution of humanity into Men, Women, 
and Herveys. There is, however, no reason for sup- 
posing that in this instance Eichardson intended any 
subtlety of classification. The story, such as it is, runs 
as follows : — Miss Harriet Byron is an orphan of great 
personal charms — a little "chinch," perhaps, like 
Miss Mulso — who has been educated by her grand- 
parents in a most exemplary way. Having, moreover, 
a comfortable fortune of fifteen thousand pounds, she 
is fully equipped, in eighteenth-century phraseology, 
" with all the Accomplishments necessary to render 
the Marriage State truly happy," and she is con- 
sequently an object of much interested solicitude to 
the country gentlemen of the vicinity. At the opening 
of the story, she has quitted the house of her uncle, 
George Selby, Esq., where she lives, in order to visit 
her London cousins, Mr. and Mrs. Eeeves, leaving 
behind her three disconsolate admirers, Mr. Greville 

1 Mrs. Barbauld prints "competition." But " composition," 
which is suggested by Dr. Birkbeck Hill in reproducing this 
letter, is obviously intended. 



148 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

(who describes her at length in a letter to a friend), 
Mr. Fenwiek, and Mr. Orme. On reaching town, new 
suitors arrive hot-foot, one being a gentleman named 
Fowler, who wooes her through his uncle, Sir Eowland 
Meredith an importunate old bachelor in a full-buckled 
wig and gold-buttoned coat. To him follows Sir 
Hargrave Pollexfen, a bold-eyed, rakehelly baronet, 
of a large estate, who is described as voluble, hand- 
some, and genteel, pretty tall, and about twenty-eight 
or thirty. This is one of Eichardson's libertines on 
the Lovelace pattern. He falls deeply in love with 
the captivating heroine, and does not in the least dis- 
semble his passion. Miss Byron, being pressed to 
explain why she cannot receive his addresses, tells 
him frankly, and much to his disgust, that she has no 
opinion of his morals. He afterwards renews his suit 
in a way of which the following may serve as a 
sample : — 

"You objected to my morals, madam: Have you 
any other objection? 

Need there be any other? 

But I can clear myself. 

To God, and to your conscience, then do it, Sir. 
I want you not to clear yourself to me. 

But, madam, the clearing myself to you would be 
clearing myself to God, and my conscience. 

What language is this, Sir ? But you can be 
nothing to me: Indeed you can be nothing to me — 
Rise, Sir; rise, or I leave you. 

I made an effort to go. He caught my hand, 
and arose — Then kissed it, and held it between 
both his. ... 



vi.] HISTORY OF SIB CHABLES GBANDISON 149 

Your objections ? I insist upon knowing your 
objections. My person, madam — Forgive me, I am 
not used to boast — My person, madam 

Pray, Sir Hargrave. 

— Is not contemptible. My fortune 

God bless you, Sir, with your fortune. 

— Is not inconsiderable. My morals 

Pray, Sir Hargrave ! Why this enumeration to me ? 

— Are as unexceptionable as those of most young 
men of fashion in the present age. 

[I am sorry if this be true, thought I to myself.] 

You have reason I hope, Sir, to be glad of that. 

My descent 

Is honourable, Sir, no doubt. 

My temper is not bad. I am thought to be a man of 
vivacity, and of chearfulness — I have courage, madam 
— And this should have been seen, had I found reason 
to dread a competitor in your favour. 

I thought you were enumerating your good qualities, 
Sir Hargrave. 

Courage, madam, magnanimity in a man, madam 

Are great qualities, Sir. Courage in a right cause, 
I mean. Magnanimity, you know, Sir, is greatness of 
mind. 

And so it is ; and I hope " 

And so the discussion proceeds until it is closed by 
Miss Byron's positive declaration that she will never 
more receive Sir Hargrave' s visits, an announcement 
which naturally drives him to desperation, after which 
the letter placidly concludes with a description of the 
dress in which the young lady is- to flutter the pretty 
fellows at a masquerade at the Haymarket on the 



150 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

following night. It is one of those enumerations in 
which Eichardson delights, and is supposed to indicate 
an Arcadian princess. "Des bergers, — on ne volt que 
cela part out, 11 says the wondering Monsieur Jourdain in 
Moliere's play ; but he might well have marvelled at 
this one, who wore a white Paris net sort of cap, 
glittering with spangles, and encircled by a chaplet of 
artificial flowers, with a little white feather perking 
from the left ear; a Venetian mask; blond lace 
tucker and ruffles ; blue satin waistcoat trimmed with 
silver Point d'Espagne, and set off with bugles [beads] 
and spangles ; a blue satin petticoat to match, without 
a hoop ("They wore not hoops in Arcadia"); a scarf 
of white Persian silk, and a large Indian fan. 

The next step, of course, is an abduction. At the 
masquerade Sir Hargrave, with the assistance of a 
servant whom he has suborned, contrives to carry off 
Miss Byron in her chair and masquerade costume to a 
house at Lisson Green (now Lisson Grove) inhabited 
by a widow and her two daughters, who, " for a con- 
sideration," have no scruples in helping him to an 
honourable marriage. No ruin is intended — she is 
expressly assured. One of the richest and noblest 
men in England is dying for her. She is not engaged, 
he contends, and therefore must and shall be his, or 
murder may follow, for he is resolved to be the death 
of any lover whom she may encourage. And there- 
upon a Fleet parson is produced, who is depicted by 
the author with that broad Hogarthian brush which he 
usually employs for those of his subordinate characters 
who have no character at all. He was " a vast tall, 
big-boned, splay-footed man," with "a shabby gown ; 
as shabby a wig; a huge red pimply face; and a nose 



vi.] HISTOBY OF SIB CHABLES GBANDISON 151 

that hid half of it, when he looked on one side, and he 
seldom looked fore-right." . . . " He had a dog's-ear'd 
common-prayer book in his hand, which once had been 
gilt; opened ... at the page of matrimony." To 
make matters worse, he snuffled horribly, and when he 
parted his pouched mouth, "the tobacco hung about 
his great yellow teeth." In the scene that follows, this 
"unholy minister " — to use the appropriate language 
of the table of " Contents " — " endeavours to commence 
the solemn service of the church." But the agitation 
of the lady, and her frenzied appeals to the women 
folk present, render this impracticable. At last, en- 
deavouring in her terror to escape from the room, she 
is seriously hurt, and her tormentor is alarmed. The 
parson and his clerk, who have been waiting develop- 
ments in the chimney-corner over a jug of ale, hastily 
beat a retreat ; and the baffled Sir Hargrave has nothing 
for it but to muffle his prey in a cloak and capuchin, 
and hurry her off in a carriage to his country-house 
at Windsor, telling inquirers on the road that he is 
taking home a runaway wife, who (like Hogarth's Lady 
Squanderfield) has been escaping from a masquerade 
to a lover. But the deliverer is at hand. On Houns- 
low Heath they are encountered by another chariot 
and six, containing a very fine gentleman indeed. He 
persists in responding to Miss Byron's appeals for help ; 
twists Sir Hargrave out of his coach with such energy 
as to make that vehicle rock again ; flings him under 
the hind wheel ; neatly snaps his silver-hilted sword 
in two, and politely placing the lady in his own 
equipage, bears her off triumphantly to the house of 
his brother-in-law, the Earl of L., at Colnebrook, 
where he deposits her for the time being in the 



152 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

keeping of his younger sister, who forthwith com- 
municates with her friends. 

All this is very minutely, and it must be admitted, 
very vividly related in the different letters of the 
persons concerned. The gentleman who thus splen- 
didly and effectively makes his entrance upon the scene 
is Richardson's "man of true honour/' Sir Charles 
Grandison, who has just returned to England after 
a lengthy visit to the Continent. As may be antici- 
pated, Sir Har grave, as soon as he can leave his room, 
sends him a pressing invitation to repair, with the 
proper equipment, to Kensington Gravel-pits. And 
here comes in the solution of Richardson's great diffi- 
culty. Although he is an expert swordsman, Sir 
Charles of course refuses, as duelling is contrary to 
his principles. In a long interview with Sir Hargrave's 
representative, Mr. Bagenhall ; and in a second and 
longer meeting with Sir Hargrave and his friends — 
a shorthand writer being conveniently present on both 
occasions — he justifies his action. He will not draw 
his sword upon a challenge, though he will defend him- 
self, if attacked. His life is not his own, much less is 
another man's his. He does not regard the so-called 
laws of honour ; but he owns to the laws of God and 
his country. Richardson makes these arguments, which, 
in their full exposition, keep the shorthand writer pretty 
hard at work, produce a marked effect upon the other 
side, who are gradually won over by the elaborate 
coolness, courage, and magnanimity of Grandison. 
Eventually the penitent and somewhat dilapidated Sir 
Hargrave waits upon Miss Byron to entreat her for- 
giveness, which she grants; but undeterred by com- 
passion for his damaged good-looks ("I -had now and 



vi.] HIS TOBY OF SIB CHABLES GBANDISON 153 

then a little pity for his disfigured mouth and lip"), 
absolutely declines to consider his proposals of mar- 
riage — a decision which, in spite of a formal denial, 
he is perhaps not unnaturally disposed to attribute to 
Miss Byron's liking for her deliverer. 

That she has fallen hopelessly in love with Sir 
Charles Grandison is in the nature of things. But a 
sixth suitor appears upon the scene in the person of 
the Earl of D. (with twelve thousand a year), who is 
highly recommended by her friends, while Sir Charles 
Grandison, though obviously impressed by the beauty 
and good qualities of the lady he has rescued, makes 
no attempt to improve the occasion, or to respond to 
a passion which she, on her side, finds it extremely 
difficult to conceal. II y a toujours un autre — as the 
proverb says ; and the explanation is, that he is prac- 
tically pre-engaged. When in Italy, he had saved a 
certain Barone della Porretta from assassination by 
some Brescian bravoes, and had thus grown acquainted 
with the noble Porretta family of Bologna, going even 
to such lengths as to teach the only daughter English, 
with the usual result. The Signorina Clementina della 
Porretta (one loves — as Goldsmith says — "to give the 
whole name ") had become desperately attached to her 
instructor, who was of course too discreet a fine gentle- 
man to show any signs of returning her affection, 
especially as he was a Protestant, and his Italian 
friends were Boman Catholics. When the state of 
their daughter's affections was at last made manifest, 
the Porrettas had proposed to him to renounce his 
religion, and make certain other concessions which he 
could not accept. 

As no compromise was found feasible, he quitted 



154 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

Italy, and Clementina lost her reason in consequence. 
All these things, or most of them, he communicates to 
Miss Byron at a private interview, when she is visiting 
Colnebrook, where she has been previously made aware, 
at immeasurable length, and with much needless detail, 
of the entire and not wholly worshipful history of the 
Grandison family, which history she in her turn 
repeats by letter (there are some fifteen on this 
theme alone) to her cousin and correspondent, Lucy 
Selby. The outcome of Grandison's confidences to 
Miss Byron is, that the Porretta family have again 
summoned him to a consultation, and the nature of 
the summons seems to indicate that, in the state of 
their daughter's health, they are prepared to give way 
further in order to secure her happiness. So Sir 
Charles, as in duty bound, departs for Italy, leaving 
Miss Byron in what may undoubtedly be described as 
a " delicate distress." 

It would be undesirable, if it were not unnecessary, 
to imitate here the interminable deliberation with 
which all these continental negotiations are carried 
out. At last, when, owing to surrenders on both 
sides, matters seem tending to a solution adverse to 
Miss Byron, Clementina's awakened conscience rather 
unexpectedly reminds her that, even if her parents 
permit her to marry a heretic, it is her duty to 
renounce her love rather than her religion. This 
decision she communicates to her suitor in a letter 
which M. Texte not unjustly characterises as admirable. 
How can she bind her soul to a soul allied to perdi- 
tion? How can she be sure that he will not draw 
her after him by love, by sweetness of manner, by 
condescending goodness ? In such and similar terms 



yi.] HISTOBY OF SIB CHABLES GBANDISON 155 

she announces her determination not to marry, but 
to take the veil, urging her lover further, with com- 
mendable unselfishness, to seek an English bride. Sir 
Charles, whose behaviour has of course been painfully 
irreproachable throughout, is consequently free to 
pay his addresses to Miss Byron. Making a last 
fruitless, but scrupulously formal, attempt to shake 
Clementina's resolution, he returns home, and at 
once devotes all his available energies to his new 
enterprise. After a "rencounter" with Mr. Greville, 
whom, as may be anticipated, he adroitly disarms (Sir 
Hargrave, it may be premised, dies penitent, leaving 
large legacies to Sir Charles and his wife), and a six- 
weeks' engagement which takes two volumes to re- 
count, he is married to Miss Byron. But the story 
still goes on. Lady Grandison's Italian predecessor 
reappears on the scene, flying in disguise from an 
importunate suitor ; her family follow ; and are 
all ultimately assembled at Grandison Hall. At 
the close it is understood that there is to be no 
cloister, and that Clementina may in due time 
accept the addresses of her admirer, the Count of 
Belvedere. Then comes a Postscript, in which 
Richardson answers objectors to the faultless character 
of his hero, and vindicates his views on duelling by 
printing a section of the Articles of War. With 
all his perfection and imperfection, Sir Charles — we 
are told — is intended as a pattern, not indeed to 
be imitated completely, but endeavoured after. And 
the Postscript winds up with an apposite quotation 
from Tillotson's sermons, in part of which that 
" eminent Divine M appears to plagiarise a well-known 
couplet of George Herbert. " He that aims at the 



156 SAMUEL RICHAKDSON [chap. 

heavens, which yet he is sure to come short of, is like 
to shoot higher than he that aims at a mark within 
his reach." x 

The above is naturally a very imperfect outline of 
the History of Sir Charles Grandison. Whether he was, 
in reality, or whether he would ever be taken for, 
the model which Richardson intended him to be, are 
questions still in debate, unless indeed they are held 
to be unanswerably settled by the fact he has been 
almost universally accepted as the popular exponent 
of a courtesy which has more of buckram and punctilio 
than of genuine benevolence and propriety. But the 
modern reader who approaches the book with open 
mind — and open eyes — for seven volumes, two of 
which might certainly have been spared, are no 
summer' s-day pastime, will perhaps regard him a little 
more indulgently than the critic who dismisses him 
impatiently as a self-conscious prig. As his latest 
biographer justly remarks, self-consciousness is in- 
separable from the analytic method ; and Sir Charles 
Grandison is not Richardson's solitary sinner in this 
kind. Like Carlyle's Monks of Mount Athos, most of 
his characters are in the habit of morbidly interro- 
gating their internal mechanism. But forgive this, — 
forgive the author's constitutional longwindedness, — 
forgive the old-fashioned gallantry which requires a hero 
(" as calls himself a hero ") to wipe the tear-drop from 
a heroine's cheek, and afterwards to kiss the handker- 
chief ; — forgive the lapses of a writer depicting by an 
effort of imagination a society of which he knew little 

1 " — who aimeth at the sky- 
Shoots higher much than he that means a tree." 

The Temple, lvi. 



vi.] HISTOBY OF SIB CHABLES GBANDISON 157 

or nothing experimentally : * — forgive or forget all 
these things ; and it is really marvellous how well he 
has succeeded in his self-imposed task, — how much he 
has avoided which might have been absurd, — and how 
interesting upon the whole his hero remains. Becog- 
nising that to make him reveal himself too much 
would be out of character, Richardson has, however, 
put his praises far too lavishly into the mouths of 
those about him. And it is these who most offend. 
Grandison himself is not really so unsupportable : it 
is the women worshippers (there are half a dozen 
besides Harriet and Clementina) ; it is the " led- 
friends," and parasites, and pensioners, and proteges, 
who surround and applaud him, like the chamberlains 
in the French tale, with their monotonous refrain : — 

" Que son me" rite est extreme ! 
Que de graces, que de grandeur. 
Ah ! combien Monseigneur 
Doit §tre content de lui-meme." 

He is brave, he is generous, he is honourable, he is 
handsome, and he refuses to dock his horses' tails, — 
which was certainly advanced humanity. Kectify him 

1 He himself admitted this, as we have seen (ante, p. 51) ; 
and upon this point, we may hear his great rival. " I am apt 
to conceive, " says Fielding, in Tom Jones, Book xiv. Chap, i., 
"that one reason why many English writers have totally failed 
in describing the manners of upper life, may possibly be, that, 
in reality they know nothing of it." . . . " A true knowledge 
of the world is gained only by conversation [i.e. intercourse], 
and the manners of every rank must be seen in order to be 
known." In an admirable paper on "Morals and Manners 
in Richardson," printed in the National Review for November 
1889, Mrs. Andrew Lang, with an insight denied to "mere 
man," has collected and criticised some of Richardson's 
lapses. 



158 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

by the considerations above set forth, and the reader 
who has, in addition, fortitude enough to overcome 
an excusable repugnance to oppressive superior good- 
ness, will probably be more ready to concur with the 
Master of Balliol and Mr. Buskin who admired him, 
than with the brilliant but unkind M. Hippolyte 
Taine, who suggested flippantly that he should be 
canonised and stuffed. 

Indeed it may be even contended that he is a 
greater feat of cleverness than any of the other per- 
sonages in the book, since none of them — of the 
women at all events — excel Clarissa and Miss Howe. 
Despite the praise of Warton, the much- vaunted mad- 
ness of Clementina is not better done than the mental 
disorder of Clarissa ; and a large portion of Miss 
Howe goes to equip Miss Byron as well as Miss 
Charlotte Grandison. There are, we believe, who re- 
gard Miss Charlotte Grandison as an amusing per- 
son. That she is sprightly and vivacious, there is 
no doubt. But she is also undeniably ill-mannered, 
and her rudeness is as incapable of pardon as the 
villainy of Lovelace. When Lady Mary, commenting 
on Miss Grandison's failure to distinguish between 
pert folly and humour — between ill-nature and spirit 
— says roundly that she should have been treated like 
a humoursome child, and well whipped, she is express- 
ing an opinion in which, even in her own day, she was 
by no means alone. For according to Miss Talbot, 
writing to Miss Carter, the Bishop of Oxford, with 
whom Miss Talbot was staying, l was entirely in 
agreement with the course proposed. " I do love her 

1 Dr. Seeker, with whom Miss Talbot lived, was Bishop of 
Oxford, and Dean of St. Paul's. 



vi.] HISTOBY OF SIB CHABLES GBANDISON 159 

[Charlotte]," says Miss Talbot to her friend, " as well 
as you do, but I do not think you speak with sufficient 
respect of Lord G., and her ladyship [Charlotte again] 
richly deserved two or three hearty beatings and kick- 
ings which the Bishop of Oxford did most heartily 
wish her." That, in any matrimonial alliance, Miss 
Grandison's force of character would make her the 
predominant partner, is probable; but it is not to 
be believed that any husband — even a china-collector 
and " fly-catcher " — should have endured her rude- 
ness without reply. "An oak with but one green 
leaf on it would have answered her," — as Signor Bene- 
dick says. She comes of the same inconceivable stock 
as Lady Davers in Pamela. Whether there is any 
truth in the report that Richardson borrowed some 
of her traits from Lady Bradshaigh, it is now difficult 
to decide ; but at all events it is curious that some of 
her most individual expressions are to be found in 
Lady Bradshaigh' s correspondence ; and that Lady 
Bradshaigh herself refers " to the saucy freedoms and 
impertinences with which she [Lady B.] is too natur- 
ally inclined to treat her best friends." 

While there is not in Grandison, as in Clarissa, one 
central or dominating event, there is, on the other 
hand, no lack of characters destined, for the most 
part, to serve as stocks upon which the hero may 
exercise his gamut of good qualities. Indeed the 
variety and fertility of these subordinates, as well as 
the abundance of incident and invention, is most 
remarkable, looking to Richardson's continual protests 
as to his age, infirmities, and failing powers. Never- 
theless, apart from the hero and his "two loves," 
there is none of the other characters — the Selbys, 



160 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

the Shirleys, the Keeveses, the Beauchamps, and so 
forth — who calls clamorously for extended remark, 
while of some of the men it must be admitted that 
they are but variations, more or less attenuated, of 
characters in the earlier books. And here may be 
mentioned one of the peculiarities of the Eichardson 
gallery. While, with others of his rivals, it is difficult 
not to identify their characters with living persons, 
real or imaginary, it is part of his process of 
invention [the above not very manifest exception of 
Lady Bradshaigh does but prove the rule] that no 
one has seriously sought for any recognisable models 
for Clarissa, or Grandison, or Lovelace. 1 Had they 
been drawn " from the quick " — as the old designers 
put it — such models had not been far to seek. But 
they were minted in the author's " study of imagina- 
tion," and we can no more seek for their prototypes 
in actual life than we can seek for the prototypes of 
Hamlet and Iago. 

As in the case of Clarissa, Richardson seems to have 
received various criticisms and suggestions in regard 
to Grandison; and, after his fashion, to have defended 
himself in lengthy letters. Two of these, at least, are in 
existence in printed form. One, dated March 15, 1754, is 
headed " Copy of a Letter to a Lady, who was solicitous 
for an additional volume [!] to the History of Sir Charles 
Grandison, supposing it ended abruptly ; and expressing 
herself desirous to see Sir Charles's Conduct and Be- 
haviour in the Parental Character ; and to know if the 

1 There can be nothing in Johnson's suggestion, as reported 
in Miss Seward's Anecdotes (ii. 223), that Grandison was mod- 
elled on Mr. Robert Nelson of the Festivals and. Fasts, who died 
in 1715. 



vi.] HIS TOBY OF SIB CHABLES GBANDISON 161 

Story were intended to be carried further." 1 Bichard- 
son answers in four pages of minute type, and with the 
most admirable gravity. The story will not be continued, 
he says. As to its ending abruptly, he points out that, 
while Pamela was supposed to have taken place within 
thirty, and Clarissa within twenty years of their re- 
spective publications, Sir Charles Grandison is com- 
paratively up to date, or, in less modern phrase, is 
brought down "pretty near to the present time" 
[1754]. It is, therefore, quite out of the question to 
carry the fortunes of the characters further at present, 
with any regard to probability. Lady Grandison, for 
instance, cannot go to Italy to visit the Porrettas 
before her lying-in, — "the heir of Sir Charles Grandi- 
son must not be needlessly, or for a compliment, 
exposed to dangers and difficulties;" Clementina, 
"her malady not returning," cannot marry the Count 
of Belvedere for a year, — and so forth. As to the other 
characters, he has, he contends, done quite enough 
on their behalf. Everybody who deserves well, is re- 
warded ; for the rest, " who cares for them ? " With 
respect to the portrayal of Sir Charles in the parental 
character, he has entered into that subject pretty 
largely in Pamela, and it is besides easy to see that 
Sir Charles would be an excellent father of a family. 
"Permit me further to observe," he says finally, "that 
the conclusion of a single story is indeed generally some 
great and decisive event ; as a Death or a Marriage : 
But in scenes of life carried down nearly to the present 

1 The writer was not alone in this inquiry. " The Gotten- 
burg translators " — says Mrs. Barbauld — " sent for the rest of 
the work, supposing it incomplete." {Correspondence, 1804, 
cxxxii.). 

M 



162 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

time, and in which a variety of interesting characters is 
introduced; all events cannot be decided, unless as 
in the History of Tom Thumb the Great [Fielding 
again!], all the actors are killed in the last scene; 
since persons presumed to be still living, must be 
supposed liable to the various turns of human affairs. 
All that can be expected therefore in such a work, if 
its ending is proposed to afford the most complete 
scene of felicity of which human life is capable, must 
be to leave the principal characters happy, and the rest 
with fair prospects of being so." 

The other letter is headed — "Answer to a Letter 
from a Friend, who had objected to Sir Charles 
Grandison's Offer to allow his Daughters by Lady 
Clementina, had his Marriage with her taken Effect, to 
be educated Roman Catholics." Seeing the marriage 
never came to pass even in fiction, it might perhaps be 
thought that discussion on this question was super- 
fluous, to say nothing of the fact that in his concluding 
Note to the novel, the author had seemed to deprecate, 
if not absolutely decline, any controversy of the kind. 
But as he received several anonymous letters to the effect 
that he should have exposed the iniquity of such com- 
promise, he felt bound (and he was never loth) to make 
some reply. His defence, as usual, is not an entirely 
satisfactory one, inasmuch as he appears to be opposed 
to the compromise suggested. But he points out that 
something was surrendered by the other side as well ; 
and also that, although the circumstances of the case 
compelled his hero "to make some concessions, in com- 
passion to an excellent woman, who laboured under a 
disorder of mind on his account," his action was not 
countenanced by his judgment. Indeed, he implies 



vi.] HIS TOBY OF SIB GHABLE8 QBANDISON 163 

that he [Sir Charles] " thought himself not unhappy 
that a marriage, to be entered into upon such terms, 
took not effect ; as well as that it was owing to Clemen- 
tina herself, and not to him, that it did not ; frequent 
as such compromises are in marriage-treaties between 
people of different persuasions." Whether this answer 
satisfied his correspondents, all of whom were laudably 
zealous for the interests of the Protestant cause, may 
be doubted. There is no doubt, however, that Richard- 
son valued himself not a little, as Mrs. Barbauld says, 
upon his nice conduct of this matter, and particularly 
upon his liberality to the Catholic religion. One 
minor point in connection with this letter, is its citation 
of an expression which was later to become a household 
word. The phrase, " a Citizen of the World," is as old 
as Bacon's Essays; but it is interesting to find it in 
Richardson only a few years before Goldsmith made 
it the title of his collected " Chinese Letters." Sir 
Charles Grandison, says Lucy Selby, "is, in the 
noblest sense, a Citizen of the World." 

By Richardson's admirers, Sir Charles Grandison 
was welcomed with an applause as great as that ac- 
corded to Pamela and Clarissa, Mr. Urban, reviewing 
the first four volumes only, but apparently with full 
knowledge of the whole, while admitting that the 
events and adventures were few, and that the narrative 
stood still too long, is eloquent as to their other merits. 
"All the recesses of the human heart are explored, 
and its whole texture unfolded. Such a knowledge of 
the polite world, of men and manners, may be acquired 
from an attentive perusal of this work as may in a 
great measure supply the place of the tutor and 
boarding-school. Young persons may learn how to 



164 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

act in all the important conjunctures, and how to 
behave gracefully, properly, and politely, in all the 
common occurrences of life." His private correspond- 
ents use stronger language. "I look upon you," says 
Dr. Young, who, it must be remembered, was the later 
author of The Centaur not Fabulous, "as a peculiar 
instrument of Providence, adjusted to the peculiar 
exigence of the times ; in which all would be fine 
gentlemen, and only are at a loss to know what that 
means." Cibber rants as usual, and drags in Pope. 
" Since I was born I cannot say, that in all my reading 
of ancients and moderns, I ever met with such variety 
of entertainment ; so much goodness of heart, and so 
indefatigable a capacity to give proofs of it. . . . I 
had rather have the fame that your amiable zeal for it 
[virtue] deserves, than be preferred as a poet to a Pope, 
or his Homer" 1 " He [Sir Charles] shall be my 
master," says Mr. Edwards of Turrick ; " and it will 
be my own very great fault, if I am not better for his 
lessons to the last day of my life." There is much 
more to the same effect in other letters, from which it 
is manifest that some of Eichardson's readers of 1754 
did not value their Grandison for the story alone. 
Perhaps the oddest example of this is contained in a 
letter included among the miscellaneous correspondence 
at South Kensington, and purporting to come from an 

1 Cibber' s language is extravagant ; but it has been made 
worse than it deserves. In one of his letters to Richardson, 
of which Mrs. Barbauld prints a facsimile in her sixth volume, 
he expresses his desire to come " and nibble upon a bit more " 
of Miss Byron, upon whom he has already made " a delicious 
meal." In the text the printers have substituted for " nibble " 
another and less appropriate word, with which he is usually s 
and unfairly, credited. 



vi.] HISTORY OF SIB CHABLES GBANDISON 165 

imprisoned debtor. Under date of 2nd May 1754, 
one " B. F." writes to Richardson to announce his con- 
version from libertinism, owing to the improving in- 
fluence of Sir Charles Grandison, and the salutary 
monition conveyed by the dreadful catastrophe of 
Sir Hargrave Pollexfen. What five years' incarcera- 
tion, with all its attendant want and indigence, could 
not effect, Richardson's "good man " has achieved ; and 
for the future, virtue and honour are to be the standard 
and governor of all the writer's actions. This in- 
genuous effusion may, of course, have been bond fide. 
But, in all probability, it was speedily followed by 
some liberal gratuity from the fluttered and flattered 
author, which, as speedily, went the way of that guinea 
thoughtfully despatched every Monday by his friends 
to another enforced resident in the Fleet Liberties, 
Mr. Richard Savage, by whom, as Johnson assures us, 
it was " commonly spent before the next Morning." 

In the first of the two letters upon the subject of 
Sir Charles Grandison, to which reference has recently 
been made, Richardson states that the delay in issuing 
his final volume — a delay which had caused some 
persons to imagine that " marvellous events, and 
violent catastrophes, were preparing " — was occasioned 
" by the treatment I met with from Dublin." He has 
himself explained these circumstances in a pamphlet 
issued in September 1753, with the title, The Case of 
Samuel Richardson, of London, Printer, on the Invasion 
of his Property in the History of Sir Charles Grandison, 
before Publication, by certain Booksellers in Dublin. He 
had arranged with George Faulkner, the Dublin Book- 
seller, and friend of Swift, to take sheets of the work 
to be set up, and printed in Dublin, He had been 



166 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

warned against possible piracy ; but he had, as he 
imagined, by special injunctions to his foreman and 
others, taken all reasonable precautions. Nevertheless, 
by a combination of bribery, negligence, and fraud, 
during his absence on a brief visit to Bath to bring 
back his daughter Polly, the sheets of five of the 
volumes, and parts of the sixth and seventh, were 
smuggled to Ireland, where an incomplete and un- 
authorised edition was issued before the book had 
appeared in London, — the piratical putters-f orth being 
Messrs. Exshaw, Wilson, and Saunders of Dublin. 
Richardson was highly incensed, and no doubt fretted 
sadly, as his correspondence shows, over this " Invasion 
of his Property " by the " Irish Rapparees," for which, 
however, in the existing state of the law, it was not 
possible for his friends to offer any consolation but 
sympathy. He issued the above-mentioned pamphlet, 
and made various appeals to his Irish correspondents, 
but without obtaining any redress. Worse than this, 
he seems to have had reason to apprehend that the 
same nefarious course would be taken in Scotland, and 
that pirated copies would be transmitted to Prance 
for translation. 

Among other persons who commented upon this 
piece of unjustifiable sharp practice was Arthur 
Murphy, who, in No. 3 of his new paper, the Gray's 
Inn Journal, and under his assumed character of " Mr. 
Charles Ranger," made it the text of some very sen- 
sible remarks upon the calamities of authors. After 
referring to these in general, and particularly to that 
infamous and detestable action for which, " owing to 
the Poverty of the Language," no stronger term is 
used than piracy, he goes on — "Mr. Richardson, 



vi.] HISTOBY OF SIB CHABLES GBANDISON 167 

Author of the celebrated Pamela, and the justly 
admired Clarissa (if I may be allowed to judge from 
his Productions) is subject to every delicate Sensation 
above ascribed to fine Writers, and therefore, after his 
having prepared for the Public, TJie History of Sir 
Charles Grandison, and printed the same entirely 
at his own Expence, which cannot but amount to a 
large Sum, an ingenuous Mind must be shocked to find, 
that Copies of very near all this Work, from which the 
Public may reasonable expect both Entertainment and 
Instruction, have been clandestinely and fraudulently 
obtained by a Set of Booksellers in Dublin, who have 
printed off the same, and advertised it in the public 
Papers, even before the lawful Proprietor has made 
Publication here. 

" I am not inclined to cast national Eeflections, but 
I must avow, that I look upon this to be a more 
flagrant and atrocious Proceeding than any I have 
heard of for a long Time. Wit has been finely called, 
'the Owner's Wife, which other Men enjoy/ and, in 
this Instance, the Phrase appears to me more just than 
ever, as great Part of that Profit, which Mr. Richardson 
might justly promise himself, is rapaciously seized 
from him, and that too, by the vile Artifices of Bribing 
the Author's Servants, which is a Practice unworthy 
of the meanest Member of the Common- Wealth of 
Learning." 

The paper concludes with an expression of regret 
that the laws of the land have not sufficiently secured 
to Authors the property of their works ; and by the 
issue of a burlesque order from Parnassus, signed by 
Jonathan Swift, to the students of Trinity-College, 
Dublin, enjoining them to toss Messrs. Exshaw, Wilson, 



168 SAMUEL RICHAEDSON [chap, vi 

and Saunders in a blanket, but not till they are dead." 
It does not appear that Richardson obtained even this 
modest satisfaction for his wrongs; and, though he 
afterwards sent a cheap authorised edition of Sir 
Charles to Ireland, the pirates continued to undersell 
him, and he made but scant profit in that island by his 
venture. 



CHAPTER VII 

LAST YEARS AND GENERAL ESTIMATE 

Once — in all probability upon that visit to Bath with 
Mrs. Eichardson to which reference was made in the 
foregoing chapter — the Eev. Eichard Graves, Eector 
of Claverton, and afterwards author of the Spiritual 
Quixote, met the author of Sir Charles Grandison at the 
house of Mr. James Leake, who, it will be remembered, 
was Bichardson's brother-in-law. The interview took 
place in the bookseller's parlour, which we may, per- 
haps, fairly assume to have been that pleasant, and 
still existent, vaulted chamber on the " Walks/' close 
to Lilliput Alley, which was the favoured resort of 
Fielding's " 'Squire Airworthy," Ealph Allen, and 
where Sheridan, later, is said to have written The 
Rivals. 1 Eichardson told Mr. Graves that he was going 
to dine with Mr. Allen at Prior Park. " Twenty years 
ago," said he, " I was the most obscure man in Great 
Britain, and now I am admitted to the company of the 
first characters in the Kingdom." His exultation was 
pardonable, but exaggerated. Many estimable and 
some distinguished people had recognised his ability, 
but they scarcely constituted the illustrious body to 
whom he compared them. " The doors of the Great were 

1 Peach's Life and Times of Ralph Allen, 1895, pp. 73, 135. 
169 



170 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

never opened to him/' says candid Lady Mary, with 
whom Mrs. Barbauld is very severe, appealing to 
the list of Richardson's friends and correspondents as 
proof to the contrary. But the evidence invoked 
scarcely supports her contention. It is true that 
Richardson was occasionlly visited at North End by 
the Bishop of Oxford (Dr. Seeker), and by Lord 
Trentham — the Sir Thomas Robinson who had been 
one of the Trustees of the defunct " Society for the 
Encouragement of Learning." Arthur Onslow, the 
Speaker, Richardson had known before he began to 
write. But for his other friends, — Lady Bradshaigh, 
and Lady Echlin, the Delanys, Mrs. Donnellan, Miss 
Sutton, Warburton, Allen himself, Young, and so 
forth, — they can hardly be held to justify the de- 
scription of them which he has given. That they were 
friends of a standing greatly superior to that of those 
he might have expected to make had he continued to 
be nothing but a Fleet Street printer, and that he was 
justifiably proud of his relations with them (he gave 
lavish vails to Onslow's servants to secure their re- 
spect) — may be conceded. But the testimony of the 
mourning rings which he left in his will shows that 
the roll of his intimates scarcely went beyond his 
known correspondents ; and it must be concluded that 
Lady Mary was substantially accurate in what she 
said. Since 1740, however, his general social position 
had distinctly improved, and his means, without opu- 
lence, were easy. His books, though still professedly 
anonymous, had brought him considerable reputation ; 
and he had, in due course, become Master of the 
Stationers' Company, — an office, says Mrs. Barbauld, 
" not only honourable but lucrative," and of which the 



vii.] LAST YEARS AND GENERAL ESTIMATE 171 

sole drawback was the pitiful part which a valetudi- 
narian must play at those full-fed city-feasts of which 
Hogarth has given us a glimpse in the eighth plate of 
Industry and Idleness. " I cannot but figure to myself " 
— writes Thomas Edwards — " the miserable example 
you will set at the head of their loaded tables, unless 
you have two stout jaw-workers for your wardens, 
and a good hungry court of assistants ! " 

This letter is dated 20th November 1754. A week 
or two earlier, Eichardson, much to the dismay of his 
" worthy-hearted wife," had moved from his comfortable 
house at North End to the new suburban residence at 
Parson's Green of which mention was made in Chapter 
y. The reasons for this appear to have been imperative. 
His old landlord, Samuel Vanderplank, had died in 
1749; and the property was now in the hands of a 
Mr. Pratt. Mr. Vanderplank, who had two daughters 
with good expectations, was apparently as alive as was 
Eichardson in the Familiar Letters to the dangers likely 
to arise from the " clandestine Addresses of Fortune- 
hunters " ; and occupying, as he did, the other half of 
the Grange, was not ill-pleased to have for neighbour 
and tenant, at a low rent, a man who was at once a 
moralist, and a married man without sons. But Mr. 
Pratt, to whom Mr. Vanderplank's estate passed from 
his son-in-law, Mr. Gilbert Jodrell, was of a different 
temper. Not only did he propose to raise the rent 
from £25 to £40 a year ; but he declined to make any 
allowance for the improvements which Eichardson had 
effected, among which, it has been suggested, the 
famous grotto should perhaps have been included. 
From another source we learn that the transfer to 
Parson's Green, in alterations to the house and garden, 



172 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

cost Eichardson £300, so that, at his advanced age, it 
would almost seem as if it might have been more 
economical in the end to have remained where he was 
even at a rental of double his original amount. But he 
had doubtless, in too great perfection, the Englishman's 
dislike to being taken at a disadvantage, to make any 
minute calculation in the matter; and in October 1754 
he quitted North End, which had been his home for 
sixteen years, or the whole of his literary life. 
" Eichardson is very busy/' writes Mrs. Delany, under 
date of the 30th, " removing this very day to Parson's 
Green. Dr. Delany called yesterday at Salisbury 
Court." On the 26th of the following month, he is in 
residence. " The Speaker was so good as to call upon 
me at Parson's Green. He liked the house and situa- 
tion." And Mrs. Eichardson is becoming reconciled to 
the change. " She and her girls have been settled in 
the new habitation for near a month past; and like it 
better and better, as they declare, every day." Then 
comes a later letter in December. " She [Mrs. Eichard- 
son], as you foretold, likes her removal to Parson's 
Green every day more and more." 

The new house, which was in reality an old house, 
since, as far back as 1679, it had been the residence of 
a subsequent Lord Chief-Justice of the King's Bench, 
Sir Edmund Saunders, is now no longer in existence, 
having been pulled down early in the last century. 
According to the Ambulator for 1800, it stood " at the 
corner of the Green," west of Peterborough House, on 
a site which, when Brayley wrote, sixteen years later, 
corresponded with that of the house terminating Pitt's 
Peace, now Arragon House [247 New King's Eoad], 
but then occupied as an academy by Dr. James Taylor. 



vii.] LAST YEARS AND GENERAL ESTIMATE 173 

It lay consequently, as Richardson describes it, on the 
road to Fulham, Putney, and Richmond. In 1779 it 
was sketched and engraved by J. P. Malcolm, of 
Chalton Street, Somers Town, who calls it in his title 
" The House at Fulham in which Richardson wrote 
Clarissa." x As to Fulham, he was right, for Parson's 
Green, like North End, was in Fulham Parish ; but as 
to Clarissa, he was manifestly wrong, since Clarissa had 
not only been written but published many years before. 
Malcolm's print shows the porch from which Richardson 
was prepared to welcome the passing stranger. Whether 
the North End grotto, or any part of it, found its way 
to the new residence, cannot be affirmed. Mme. de 
Genlis, who, many years afterwards, visited Richard- 
son's son-in-law, Mr. Bridgen, in order to inspect a 
portrait of the novelist, was shown in Mr. Bridgen's 
garden a seat on which Richardson had been accus- 
tomed to sit and compose, the right arm of which 
opened, and held an inkstand. This undoubtedly 
suggests the seat at North End which Mr. Erasmus 
Reich of Leipzig is declared to have embraced in his 
enthusiasm. " I kissed the ink-horn on the side of it," 
says the perfervid gentleman from Saxony. It may 
be that the fittings of the North End summer-house, 
which was one of Richardson's " improvements," found 
their way to Parson's Green; and thus the artless 
poem which appears in the fifth volume of Dodsley's 
Collection (1763) becomes intelligible. It is headed 
Upon an Alcove, note at Parson's Green, and consists 
of eight verses of which the following are two and 
seven : — 

1 There is also a woodcut of it by M. U. Sears, after an old 
drawing, in the Saturday Magazine for 22nd June 1839. 



174 SAMUEL RICHAHDSON [chap. 

" Here the soul-harr'wing genius form'd 
His Pamela's enchanting story ! 
And here divine Clarissa died 
A martyr to our sex's glory ! 

" Here Grandison, to crown the whole, 
A bright exemplar stands confest ! 
Who stole those virtues we admire 
From the great Author's glowing breast." 

"Our sex" — betrays the female pen; and, as a 
matter of fact, the author is revealed in later editions 
of Dodsley as Mrs. Bennet, Mr. Bridgen's sister. There 
can therefore be little doubt that the " sacred seat " 
thus celebrated was the one which Mr. Eeich had kissed, 
and which Mr. Bridgen exhibited to Mme. de Genlis. 
It may be added here that, in the Parson's Green house, 
died Richardson's correspondent, Thomas Edwards. 
This was in January 1757. It has been suggested that 
one of Eichardson's reasons for fixing upon Parson's 
Green as a place of residence was to be nearer Fulhain 
Church. He certainly had a pew there, No. 7 in the 
North Gallery. But his horror of a crowd has already 
been referred to ; and his growing nervous disorders 
probably made him, at all events in his latter years, 
a sparing and infrequent worshipper. 

The removal to Parson's Green, as we have seen, 
was by no means an inexpensive one. But, in the 
following year, the house in Salisbury Court was 
announced to be unsafe, and it became necessary to 
seek some securer premises. " The house I live in," 
he tells Lady Bradshaigh's sister, Lady Echlin, in 
December 1755, "in Salisbury Court, has been ad- 
judged to have stood near its time: and my very 
great printing weights at the top of it, have made it 



vii.] LAST YEARS AND GENERAL ESTIMATE 175 

too hazardous for me to renew an expiring lease. I 
have taken a building lease of a court of houses, eight 
in number, which were ready to fall; have pulled 
them down, and on new foundations, have built a 
most commodious printing-office; and fitted up an 
adjoining house, which I before used as a warehouse, 
for the dwelling-house." If he had named the " court 
of houses, eight in number," it might have saved 
trouble to his biographers. The " adjoining house " 
to which he moved stood in the north-west corner of 
the present square, and upon the authority of succes- 
sive editions of Cunningham's London, it has generally 
been stated that the offices were in Blue Ball Court, 
now Bell's Buildings, on the eastern side. But, in 
a codicil to his will dated July 1760, he speaks of 
his offices at that date as being in White Lyon Court, 
which lies to the north of the north-west corner, and 
was entered from Fleet Street between the existing 
Salisbury Court and Whitefriars Street, — that old 
Water Lane where, at the sign of the Harrow, 
dwelt Goldsmith's long-suffering tailor, William Filby. 
White Lyon Court may fairly be said to "adjoin" 
the new house, which could scarcely be affirmed of the 
houses in Blue Ball Court. However commodious 
the new premises were, the new house was neither so 
pleasant nor so airy as the old — at least so thought 
Mrs. Bichardson. " Everybody," her husband told 
Lady Bradshaigh, " is more pleased with what I have 
done than my wife." But when he wrote, the had 
not seen it ; and perhaps grew reconciled to it rapidly, 
as she had done to the change to Parson's Green. 
Where his first house stood, it is not easy to say. A 
correspondent, quoted by Mrs. Barbauld, who visited 



176 SAMUEL EICHARDSON [chap. 

him about 1753, says it was in the centre of the 
square, which is not very definite, although it may 
be safely concluded that this could not accurately 
describe a house in a corner, though it might a 
house in the middle of a row. In any case, his 
first house has long disappeared, while the house 
that he moved to in 1755 has now given place to 
Lloyd's Printing-oflices. 

The Salisbury Court alterations cost him some 
£1400; and from the letter which tells us this, we 
also learn that, at this date, his weekly expenses to 
journeymen, etc., were from £30 to £40, and that, 
in March 1756, his bill for printing the House of 
Commons Journals was still unpaid. Not many tradi- 
tions linger about Salisbury Court beyond the well- 
known one that he used sometimes to hide a half-crown 
among the types in order to reward the early bird 
among his workmen ; and that, owing to his increasing 
nervousness, and the impenetrable deafness of his fore- 
man, Mr. Tewley, he gradually came to issue all his 
orders in writing. It is usually to this date (1756-57) 
that is assigned the story of his employing Goldsmith 
as a reader or corrector of the press — Goldsmith, it is 
said, having been recommended to his notice by a 
disabled master printer whom he was attending in 
his brief experience as a Bankside doctor. Of this 
employment there is a certain confirmation, though 
not a very direct one, in an anecdote related by one 
of Goldsmith's Edinburgh acquaintance, Dr. Farr. 
Goldsmith, says this gentleman, called upon him when 
in London one morning before he was up, dressed " in 
a rusty full-trimmed black suit," with the pockets 
stuffed with papers like the poet in Garrick's Lethe. 



vii.] LAST YEABS AND GENERAL ESTIMATE 177 

He promptly produced part of a manuscript tragedy 
which he forthwith began to read to his friend, hastily 
obliterating whatever was objected to. At last he 
let out that he had already submitted what he had 
written to Mr. Eichardson, whereupon his hearer, 
alarmed for the fate of a possible masterpiece, " per- 
emptorily declined offering another criticism upon the 
performance." It is to this period in Eichardson's 
life, too, that we must assign the familiar story of his 
timely aid to Johnson in durance. Johnson, who was 
ailing, wrote to him from Gough Square, entreating 
his assistance, being, he said, " under an arrest for five 
pounds eighteen shillings." Strahan and Millar were 
not attainable, so he appealed to Eichardson, who at 
once despatched the money, docketing the application, in 
his usual business-like way, — " March 16, 1756. Sent 
six guineas. Witness, Win. Eichardson," — William 
Eichardson being the nephew and assistant of whom 
we shall hear later in connection with his will. Arthur 
Murphy, who printed Johnson's letter from the original 
then before him (it had previously appeared in the 
Gentleman's Magazine for June 1788), is virtuously 
indignant as to the fact that the remittance only 
exceeded the request by eight shillings. "Had an 
incident of this kind occurred in one of his Eomances, 
Eichardson would have known how to grace his hero ; 
but in fictitious scenes generosity costs the writer 
nothing." This is not quite fair. Johnson, as an 
earlier letter shows, had already made demands upon 
Eichardson; and although, as far as we are aware, he 
never repeated his application, Eichardson could have 
had no means of knowing whether he was going to 
become a chronic borrower — a fact which surely 



178 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

justifies him in complying literally with the application 
made to him. 

After Grandison, Richardson essayed no further work 
of fiction. His friends, of course, called eagerly for 
more. Would he not give them a bad woman as a 
set-off to his good woman ? Then the Widow, — the 
Widow was yet unattempted. "'I wish to see an 
exemplary widow drop from your pen," writes Lady 
Echlin ; " a very wicked widow has appeared in print 
lately. An amiable character would be an agreeable 
contrast ; it would shine brightly after that black she- 
monster, the abominable Widow of the Wood" — this 
last being a scandalous pamphlet by Benjamin Victor, 
the Irish laureate and theatrical manager, dealing inci- 
dentally with several well-known Staffordshire families, 
who hastily bought it up. But although Eichardson 
was never well when he had not a pen in his hand, 
and, according to Miss Talbot, would have given a good 
deal to be fairly got into the midst of a new work, he 
was not attracted by these suggestions, or by the 
further proposition that he should try his hand at a 
Play. He continued, as before, to correspond at 
enormous length with his friends, of whom many 
still remained to him. Among epistles not hitherto 
enumerated, the South Kensington collection contains 
a series, also not included in Barbauld, from Aaron 
Hill's married daughter, Urania Johnson, now a widow, 
and apparently a very necessitous one. It extends 
from 1750 to 1758. Eichardson seems to have done 
what he could for her both by money gifts and by 
written recommendations. Urania was the most literary 
of the three sisters of Plaistow ; and when we hear of 
her for the last time, she has submitted a manuscript 



vii.] LAST YEARS AND GENERAL ESTIMATE 179 

novel called Almira to the author of Pamela and Cla- 
rissa which that incorruptible critic has been obliged 
to censure for lack of delicacy — an objection which 
was, of course, most unwillingly received. Another 
unpublished "admirer/' who occupies a considerable 
portion of two of the Eorster folios, is a Warwick 
attorney, one Eusebius Sylvester. 1 Mr. Sylvester is 
"B. F." of the Fleet "writ large." He begins by 
flattery and applications for moral counsel. These 
latter eventually take the form of requests for pecun- 
iary aid, which Eichardson rather unwillingly gives, 
as loans, tempered by advice, and the final non-pay- 
ment of the money brings the correspondence to an 
angry and undignified termination. This Sylvester 
episode exhibits Eichardson at his best and at his 
weakest, by showing how readily his native benevo- 
lence became the dupe of his morbid appetite for 
what, upon this occasion, he comes to qualify bitterly 
as the " undesired and officious Applause of his Writ- 
ings," forgetting that in his earliest communication he 
had welcomed it as "kind and generous Approba- 
tion." The spectacle is scarcely edifying; but it is 
by no means uncommon. 

After the publication of his novels, Eichardson had 
many foreign correspondents. To Pastor John Stinstra, 
who translated Clarissa into Dutch, reference has 
already been made. Another correspondent was 
Erasmus Eeich, the Leipzig librarian, who had visited 
him at North End ; and a third, Gellert the fabulist, 

1 Curiously enough, there is a Mr. Sylvester, " a worthy 
attorney," in Sir Charles Grandlson. But the real Sylvester does 
not seem to have known Richardson until August 1754, after 
Grandison was published. Richardson refers to this odd 
coincidence in his first letter to his new friend. 



180 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

who translated Pamela and Grandison, over which 
latter work, and Clarissa, according to his own confes- 
sion, he had "wept away some of the most remarkable 
hours of his life, in a sort of delicious misery." But the 
most interesting of this group is Mrs. Klopstock, the 
young and not-long-wedded wife of the author of 
the Messiah who first wrote to Eichardson in 1757. 
Apparently he had heard much of her husband through 
a certain Major Hohorst, who had visited North End, 
and composed an Ode on the death of Clarissa. As " the 
single young girl," she says, in her pretty broken 
English, she had not dared to write to the novelist ; 
but as the wife of Klopstock, she thinks she may, and 
she does. Her first letter, which is also her first letter 
in English ("French is too fade a language to use"), is 
dated 29th November, and is written to thank him for 
Clarissa and Grandison. She had wanted him to write 
"a manly [male?] Clarissa," and he has written one in 
Grandison. " Now you can write no more, you must 
write the history of an Angel." Eichardson replies by 
asking her for the brief history of her attachments, her 
pursuits, her alliances. He wishes "to know every- 
thing a relation would wish to know of his dear Ham- 
burg kindred." Thereupon she rejoins — "You will 
know all what concerns me. Love, dear Sir, is all 
what me concerns ! And love shall be all what I will 
tell you in this letter." One happy night she had read 
the Messiah (she writes), and next day was informed 
by one of Klopstock's friends that it was by Klopstock. 
" I believe, I fell immediately in love with him. At 
the least, my thoughts were ever with him filled, 
especially because his friend told me very much of his 
character." But she had no hopes of ever seeing him, 



vii.] LAST YEARS AND GENERAL ESTIMATE 181 

until she heard, quite unexpectedly, that he would pass 
through Hamburg. Upon this, she wrote immediately 
to Klopstock' s friend "for procuring by his means 
that she might see the author of the Messiah, when in 
Hamburg." The result was that Klopstock called upon 
her. " I must confess," she goes on, " that, though 
greatly prepossessed of his qualities, I never thought 
him the amiable youth whom I found him. This 
made its effect. After having seen him two hours, I 
was obliged to pass the evening in a company, which 
never had been so wearisome to me. I could not speak, 
I could not play ; I thought I saw nothing but Klop- 
stock. I saw him the next day, and the following, 
and we were very seriously friends. But the fourth 
day he departed. It was a strong hour the hour of his 
departure ! He wrote soon after, and from that time 
our correspondence began to be a very diligent one. I 
sincerely believed my love to be friendship. I spoke 
with my friends of nothing but Klopstock, and showed 
his letters. They raillied at me, and said I was in love. 
I raillied them again, and said they must have a very 
friendshipless heart, if they had no idea of friendship 
to a man as well as to a woman. Thus it continued eight 
months, in which time my friends found as much love 
in Klopstock's letters as in me. I perceived it likewise, 
but I would not believe it. At last Klopstock said 
plainly, that he loved, and I startled as for a wrong 
thing. I answered, that it was no love, but friendship, 
as it was what I felt for him ; we had not seen one 
another enough to love (as if love must have more time 
than friendship ! ) " A year after they had first seen 
each other, Klopstock came again to Hamburg, and 
the letter proceeds — " We saw, we were friends, we 



182 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

loved; and we believed that we loved; and a short 
time after I could even tell Klopstock that I loved." 
But they had still to wait two years. Her mother, a 
widow, could not agree to let her marry a stranger. At 
last the mother relented. " We married, and I am the 
happiest wife in the world. In some few months it 
will be four years that I am so happy, and still I dote 
upon Klopstock as if he were my bridegroom." A 
subsequent letter gives a picture of their married life ; 
— the progress of his poem (now past its tenth book) 
and of which she knows most, " being always present 
at the birth of the young verses ! " " You may think 
that persons who love as we do, have no need of two 
chambers ; we are always in the same," — she sitting at 
her needle, very still and quiet, while her husband, with 
rapt face, composes his hexameters. Then he reads 
her his " young verses," by which she no doubt means 
his first draught, and " suffers her criticisms." In a 
third letter her only wish ungratified for four years 
seems likely to be realised ; she is expecting to become 
a mother. Klopstock has gone on a visit to Copen- 
hagen, and they write to each other every post. But 
she will speak no more of this little cloud of separation ; 
she will only tell her happiness. "A son of my dear 
Klopstock ! Oh, when shall I have him ! It is long 
since I have made the remark, that geniuses do not 
engender geniuses. No children at all, bad sons, or 
at the most, lovely daughters, like you and Milton. 
But a daughter or a son, only with a good heart, with- 
out genius, I will nevertheless love dearly." . . . " When 
I have my husband and my child, I will write you more 
(if God gives me health and life)." But it was not to 
be; and the next letter, a brief note from a Hanover 



vii.] LAST YEARS AND GENERAL ESTIMATE 183 

correspondent, announces her death in childbirth. Her 
husband, who wrote her epitaph, survived her for forty- 
six years, and only married again very late in life, in 
order to give a kinswoman, who lived with him, a 
widow's claim to the different pensions he enjoyed. 

The remainder of Richardson's life presents few in- 
cidents of interest. The only work of any importance, 
hitherto unmentioned, which he produced was the vol- 
ume entitled A Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sen- 
timents, Maxims, Cautions, and Reflexions, contained in 
the Histories of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandi- 
son. Digested under proper Heads, with References to the 
Volume, and Page, both in Octavo and Twelves, in the 
respective Histories. It is sometimes supposed that this 
was prompted by a request of Johnson, — a supposition 
which is erroneous. When the fourth, or 1751, edition 
of Clarissa came out, it was only provided with a 
selection of the " Moral and Instructive Sentiments " 
which it contained ; and Johnson pressed in addition 
for an index rerum, which would enable the reader to 
find readily any incident to which he desired to refer. 
It was probably in response to his suggestion, which 
was renewed when Johnson received the early volumes 
of Sir Charles Grandison, that that novel was provided, 
not only with a table of the " Similies, and Allusions," 
but with a closely-packed "Index Historical and 
Characteristical " of more than one hundred pages. In 
the volume of which the title is above transcribed, the 
moral and instructive element comes again to the front, 
and the book includes little or no information as to 
the characters or occurrences in the stories. As a 
pensee-WTiter, Richardson cannot rank either with 
Pascal or Vauvenargues, — indeed the very qualities of 



184 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

his style preclude him from presenting his thoughts 
with gnomic precision; but there is naturally much 
plain sense in his utterances, and the fervent Richard- 
sonian would have no difficulty in constructing a se- 
lection of respectable, if rather trite, aphorisms from 
his four hundred pages. 

Here are a few dispersed specimens : — 

" Great men do evil, and leave it to their Flatterers 
to find a reason for it afterwards." 

" True Generosity is more than Politeness, it is more 
than good Faith, it is more than Honour, it is more 
than Justice ; since all these are but duties." 

" People who find their anger has made them con- 
siderable, will seldom be pleased." 

" Great sentiments uttered with dignity by a good 
person, gives, as it were, a visibility to the soul." 

" The art of governing the under-bred lies more in 
looks than in words." 

" The lower class of people are ever aiming at the 
stupid wonderful." 

" Persons who by their rashness have made a breach in 
their duty, should not enlarge it by their impatience." 

"To reform by an enemy's malevolence, is the 
noblest revenge in the world." 

"He that would act more greatly than a prince, 
may, before he is aware, be less than a gentleman." 

" Extraordinary merit has some forfeitures to pay." 

All but the last two of the above are taken from 
Clarissa. Here is an astounding one from Pamela : — 

" It is not beneath a person of the highest quality to 
visit and comfort one of low degree, who is contending 



vii.] LAST YEARS AND GENERAL ESTIMATE 185 

with sickness, or who is struggling in the pangs of 
death." 

At the end of the book to which is prefixed a Preface 
" by a Friend " (Warburton), Richardson reprinted the 
two letters about Grandison of which an account was 
given in the previous chapter. 

In 1757 his eldest daughter, Mary, was married to 
Mr. Philip Ditcher, a respectable surgeon at Bath, 
whose acquaintance she had no doubt made upon that 
visit to Nash's city, from which, four years before, her 
parents had fetched her back at the time of the Dublin 
piracies. It was a good match; though Richardson 
grumbled a little, partly, it seems, because Miss Polly 
had consoled herself for the loss of an old love rather 
more expeditiously than was seemly in her father's 
daughter. " Mr. Ditcher's Task was as easy as he 
could wish : Too easy, I think, between you and me, 
considering another affair was so recently gone off," 
says a letter to Mrs. Chapone in June 1758. But 
nothing much could really be offered in the way of 
objection. "He [Richardson] now, " writes Mrs. Bar- 
bauld, " allowed himself some relaxation from business ; 
and only attended from time to time, his printing- 
offices in London. He often regretted that he had 
only females to whom to transfer his business ; how- 
ever, he had taken in to assist him a nephew [this was 
the William Richardson who witnessed the loan to 
Johnson], who relieved him from the more burdensome 
cares of it, and who eventually succeeded him." Three 
years after Polly's marriage, he entered into partner- 
ship with Miss Catherine Lintot, only daughter and 
heiress of Henry Lintot, son of Pope's publisher. Miss 



186 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

Lintot was another of the young ladies to whom, from 
one of his letters to her, he seems to have stood in loco 
parentis, and he purchased a moiety of her Patent of 
Law Printer to the King, an arrangement which 
necessitated the transfer of Miss Lintot' s share of the 
business from the Savoy to Bichardson's premises in 
White Lyon Court. He was now comfortably off, and 
able to make provision for his family. But he was no 
longer young, being in fact over seventy, besides being 
enfeebled by obscure nervous disorders, and a life of 
prolonged application. Apparently, also, he suffered 
from insomnia. "Bad Best is my Misfortune and 
makes my Days unhappy," he tells Mrs. Chapone. 
" Sad, sad, writing ! a Course of terrible Nights ! " he 
says again in the above-mentioned letter to Miss 
Lintot, which is dated September 1759. In July 1761 
he was attacked by apoplexy. His illness is thus 
referred to in a letter from Miss Talbot to Mrs. 
Carter : — " Poor Mr. Richardson was seized on Sunday 
evening with a most severe paralytic stroke. ... It 
sits pleasantly upon my mind, that the last morning 
we spent together was particularly friendly, and quiet, 
and comfortable. It was the 28th of May — he looked 
then so well ! One has long apprehended some stroke 
of this kind ; the disease made its gradual approaches 
by that heaviness which clouded the cheerfulness of 
his conversation, that used to be so lively and so 
instructive ; by the encreased tremblings which unfitted 
that hand so peculiarly formed to guide the pen; 1 

1 "For years before his death," says Mrs. Barbauld, "he 
could not lift the quantity of a small glass of wine to his 
mouth, though put into a tumbler, without assistance" (Corr. 
1804, i. clxxx.) . 



vii.] LAST YEARS AND GENERAL ESTIMATE 187 

and by, perhaps, the querulousness of temper, most 
certainly not natural to so sweet and so enlarged a 
mind, which you and I have lately lamented, as 
making his family at times not so comfortable as 
his principles, his study, and his delight to diffuse 
happiness wherever he could, would otherwise have 
done." This letter was written on the 2nd July. On 
the 4th Richardson died at Parson's Green, and was 
buried in the central aisle of St. Bride's (where also 
lies his famous predecessor, Wynkyn de Worde), by 
the side of his first wife, Martha Wilde. His tomb- 
stone, which records the burial of several other 
members of his family, is near the pulpit. There is 
also a brass mural tablet in the church, erected to 
his memory in 1889 by a member of the Court of 
the Stationers' Company. 

His will, which was made in 1757 upon the marriage 
of his daughter Mary, is a characteristic production, 
very lengthy, and having four codicils. By some un- 
accountable lapse it was misdated 1727, an error which 
had of course to be rectified by deposition. Two of the 
witnesses were Miss Lintot, then about one-and-twenty, 
and Henry Campbell, no doubt the grown-up little boy, 
who had exhibited so precocious an appreciation of 
Pamela. The funeral was to be " frugally performed." 
The expenses were not to exceed £30 to his family, and 
he was to be " interred [if the circumstances permitted] 
with the remains of his late excellent wife Martha." 
Besides the mourning rings already mentioned, there 
were bequests to the children of his brothers Benjamin 
and William, for whom he had probably always been 
the rich man of the family. His widow was one of the 
Executors, her brother Allington and Andrew Millar 



188 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

being two of the others, 1 and his estate was divided 
between his wife and unmarried daughters, Mrs. 
Eichardson taking a third and the daughters two- 
thirds. There are some irritable references to his 
nephew William, who, when the will was made, was 
acting as his uncle's overseer, though not, apparently, 
to his uncle's satisfaction. Between 1757 and 1759 
William Richardson seems to have set up for himself, 
and a codicil of the latter year revokes a small bequest 
in his behalf, while in a further codicil of the following 
year he is mentioned as a " partial and selfish young 
man," who had shown " a strong disposition to take 
care of himself." This last codicil refers vaguely to 
two special acts of rashness on the part of the mis- 
guided William, but in the absence of detail, it is 
impossible to form any opinion as to the measure of 
his culpability. Whatever it was, it must have been 
condoned, since it is quite clear from Nichols that 
he succeeded his uncle in the printing-office. Nichols 
also says (Anecdotes, 1812, iv. 581 n.) that William 
Eichardson issued Proposals for a " correct, uniform, 
and beautiful " edition of his uncle's novels, together 
with some hitherto unpublished letters " on moral 
and entertaining subjects." It was to be in twenty 
volumes, octavo, at four shillings the volume. But the 
project came to nothing ; and in 1811 was rendered 
needless by the appearance of the edition in nineteen 
volumes prepared by the Eev. Edward Mangin of 

1 Andrew Millar is conjectured to have been the bookseller in- 
dicated by Johnson as " being so habitually and equably drunk, 
that his intimate friends never perceived that he was more 
sober at one time than another." If this be so, it is surely odd 
that Richardson, of all people in the world, should have 
selected him for his executor. 



vii.] LAST YEARS AND GENERAL ESTIMATE 189 

Bath. A selection of the Correspondence had already 
been issued in 1804 by Mrs. Barbauld. 

In attempting some picture of Richardson's char- 
acter, it will be well to take his best qualities first. 
He was undoubtedly a well-meaning man, diligent, 
laborious, punctual, methodical, very honourable, very 
benevolent, very rigid in his principles, and also very 
religious. He had, in fact, all the traditional virtues 
of the " Complete English Tradesman " ; and had he 
died at fifty, would have deserved no better epitaph, 
— although to his obituary notice it might have been 
added, as a supplementary merit, that he was " par- 
ticularly Esteem'd by his Friends as a Master of the 
Epistolary Style, and Noted for his singular Excel- 
lence as an Index Maker." But his deferred literary 
successes, while they disclosed and developed his latent 
genius, also developed and disclosed some other less 
worshipful traits in his disposition. The gradual pre- 
occupation with his work, which was a consequence of 
his peculiarly introspective method, eventually became 
an absorbing egotism which at last left him little else 
to think about; and an absorbing egotism passes easily 
into inordinate vanity. Added to this, his imperfect 
education and unlettered life had left him profoundly 
diffident as to the scope of his own powers, making 
it necessary that he should be periodically reassured 
as to those powers by fresh applications of flattery, 
and flattery, like some other dangerous stimulants, 
has generally to be administered in increasing doses. 
Johnson, who respected the purity of his motives, 
admitted his good qualities, and was under obligations 
to him besides, bears the strongest testimony to this 
foible in his friend. Richardson, he later told Mrs. 



190 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

Piozzi, " could not be contented to sail down the 
stream of reputation, without longing to taste the 
froth from every stroke of the oar." (The mixed meta- 
phor should no doubt be laid to the credit of the lady 
narrator.) " He died " — said Johnson again — " merely 
for want of change among his flatterers ; he perished 
for want of more, like a man obliged to breathe the 
same air till it is exhausted." With the growth of 
his appetite for praise, grew his impatience of con- 
temporary authors of any eminence. Sterne, Pope, 
Fielding — were all systematically depreciated by the 
man who professed that he had not read, or could 
not read them. Yet he found no difficulty in warmly 
commending the poetry of Young and Aaron Hill, 
and the prose of Orrery and Thomas Edwards. In 
Fielding's case, it is true that he had some definite 
ground for personal antipathy. But — as already 
hinted — he seems to have been far less affected by 
the ridicule cast upon Pamela by Joseph Andrews, 
than annoyed by the success of Clarissa's rival, Tom 
Jones. An adversary he could treat with contempt, 
real or feigned; what he could not tolerate was a 
popular competitor, and he showed his irritation, it 
must be confessed, in a very pitiful fashion. It has 
been urged — and should be remembered — that he may 
really have felt a genuine distaste for the moral tone 
of some of his more illustrious contemporaries ; but 
the contention would have more force had he 
not been a writer himself. Another characteristic, 
traceable to his early training and unexpected 
elevation, is a certain note of uneasy servility — 
where rank and riches are concerned. This crops 
up continually in his correspondence, always with 



vii.] LAST YEARS AND GENERAL ESTIMATE 191 

unpleasant effect. For the rest, a great deal must be 
allowed to the valetudinarian habit, which prompted 
him to soften the asperities of his daily life as much 
as possible, to avoid unnecessary friction, and to break 
the blow of care. " His perpetual study," says John- 
son once more, " was to ward off petty inconveniencies, 
and procure petty pleasures." These are not the ambi- 
tions of a strong-minded, self-reliant man; but they 
are intelligible, nay, to some extent excusable, in one, 
no longer young, who had worn himself out by a long- 
course of mechanical drudgery, and then cultivated 
his constitutional nervousness to the verge of disease 
by the persistent exercise of a preternaturally minute 
imaginative faculty. One can conceive that male 
companions, and especially male companions of a 
robust and emphatic kind, would have been wholly 
unsuited to such a nature, which found its fitting 
atmosphere and temperature in the society of women, 
refined enough to be appreciative, fastidious enough 
to be judiciously critical, but above all, ready and 
willing to supply him, as occasion required, with 
that fertilising medium of caressing and respectful 
commendation without which it was impossible for 
him to make any satisfactory progress with his work. 
There are several portraits of Richardson — the 
majority by Joseph Highmore. Two of these are in 
the National Portrait Gallery — one to the waist, the 
other a small full-length, which was painted in 1750, 1 
when he was sixty-one. It represents a mild-looking, 
smooth-cheeked, ruddy-faced, little man in a comfort- 
able flaxen wig, holding his right hand in his bosom 

1 A copy of the head from this portrait was engraved by- 
James Basire in the Gentleman' 's Magazine for September 1792. 



192 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

(an habitual attitude), and having a letter in his left. 
There is an earlier (?) picture at Stationers 5 Hall, 
which exhibits him with a book. Here he wears a 
claret-coloured coat, and a somewhat fuller wig. In 
both the half-length portraits, there is a chair in the 
background which, like the seat at Parson's Green, 
has an ink-pot let into the arm, which ink-pot is 
decorated by a goose quill of formidable dimensions. 
There is another portrait of Richardson by Highmore, 
which was painted for Lady Bradshaigh, and is said 
to be still in the possession of her family, while 
at Stationers' Hall there is also a picture of Richard- 
son's second wife, a pleasant, dark-eyed woman in a 
low dress and blue scarf. Hogarth is also credited 
with a portrait of the novelist. But his most char- 
acteristic presentment is surely that by Mason Chani- 
berlin. In this he is shown in the velvet cap he 
wore in the Grotto, sitting with crossed legs, and 
having in his hand the little board whereon he was 
accustomed to prepare those quarto pages of corre- 
spondence of which there are so many specimens at 
South Kensington, and which, when finished, were 
handed to Patty or William to transcribe. To com- 
plete the list of portraits, it should be added that in 
1901 a bust of Richardson by Mr. George Frampton, 
A.R.A., was placed in the St. Bride Foundation 
Institute in Fleet Street, which has been described 
as standing almost on the very spot where the novel- 
ist lived and worked. 

Of his first wife, Martha Wilde, who died long be- 
fore he attained to fame as a writer, we know little 
or nothing beyond what has been already recorded. 
Of Elizabeth Leake, her successor, there are naturally 



vii.] LAST YEARS AND GENERAL ESTIMATE 193 

fuller details. The second Mrs. Kiehardson seems to 
have been a prim, home-keeping, methodical personage, 
very precise in the performance of her household 
duties, strict in the management of her daughters, 
excellent at conserves, and copious in her curtsies. 
Probably she was a little overpowered by the gushing 
" garden of ladies " who gathered about her husband 
in his latter years, and may conceivably have felt 
a plain woman's misgivings about the genuineness 
of the feminine admirers who wrote such long and 
laudatory letters. But though there is evidence to 
prove that Eichardson fidgeted and fretted a little 
under her formal arrangements and love of manage- 
ment, there is nothing to show that she neglected 
to be amiable to his friends, or that she did not 
associate herself entirely with his good deeds and 
abundant hospitalities. Miss Thomson prints a pretty 
letter in which Eichardson presents his " dear Bet " 
with a copy of Clarissa, and apologises for the unavoid- 
able claims which that lady's history had made upon 
his attention, to the detriment of their domestic rela- 
tions. Mrs. Eichardson continued to reside at Parson's 
Green after her husband's death. In February 1771 
she issued an advertisement in the Gazetteer and New 
Daily Advertiser denying his connection with a novel 
called The History of Sir William Harrington. Two 
years afterwards, in November 1773, she died, aged 
seventy-seven ; her end, according to Mrs. Chapone, 
having been hastened by the sudden death, at Parson's 
Green, of one of her married daughters when on a visit 
there. In accordance with a wish expressed in her 
will, she was buried by her husband at St. Bride's. 
Of Eichardson's five daughters, four survived him, 



194 SAMUEL KICHARDSON [chap. 

— Mary, or Polly, who, as already mentioned, married 
Mr. Ditcher of Bath, and died a widow in 1783; 
Martha, or Patty, married in 1762 to Mr. Edward 
Bridgen, a London merchant ; Sarah, married in 1764 
to Mr. Crowther, a surgeon of Boswell Court; and 
Anne, or Nancy, whose delicate health had caused her 
parents much uneasiness, but who, nevertheless, sur- 
vived the rest of the family to die unmarried in 
December 1803, just before the publication of the 
Barbauld correspondence. Mrs. Bridgen died 13th 
February 1785, so that the married daughter who died 
at Parson's Green in 1773, if Mrs. Chapone be correct, 
must have been Mrs. Crowther. When Sir Charles 
Grandison was published, Mary, the eldest, was only 
twenty, so that they can have been little more than 
children during the period of their father's greatest 
literary activity; and the report, once current, that 
Patty assisted him in the production of Clarissa, is 
sufficiently negatived by the fact that she was only 
twelve when Clarissa was published. Later, however, 
she seems to have been his favoured amanuensis. 
According to her husband, she not only duly answered 
the letters of Richardson's foreign correspondents, but 
also replied to many of those in England. " She wrote 
with great judgment, refined sentiment, and in a style 
remarkably correct and elegant." x Another favoured 
secretary was Anne, but they were all occasionally 
enlisted. They were very carefully brought up by 
their parents, who had pronounced views on domestic 

1 This is practically confirmed by Mrs. Klopstock, who begs 
Kichardson, if writing is incommodious to him, " to dictate 
only to Mrs, Patty," who, as she has been told by Major 
Hohorst, "writes as [like] her father." 



vil] LAST YEARS AND GENERAL ESTIMATE 195 

discipline ; and perhaps on this account, as well as 
because of their youth, appear never to have held quite 
the same position with their father as the literary 
friends of their own sex, and the numerous adopted 
children whom he distinguished from the heirs of his 
body as the " daughters of his mind." " My girls are 
shy little f ools," he said ; but it is not improbable 
that, with all his insight into female character, he 
lacked the gift of putting them at their ease. It is 
probable, also, that, for many years, they could never 
have had much prolonged intercourse with the parent 
whom they saw only at meals, addressed as " Honoured 
Sir," and who, when he was not actually ill, was 
either working at his business, or writing in his 
study. 

Of Richardson's work, much, of necessity, has already 
been said in the three chapters of this book which are 
respectively devoted to his three novels ; and, in this 
place, it only remains to add some general remarks 
upon this subject, as well as upon the nature and 
character of his influence upon the writers who fol- 
lowed him both in this country and abroad. As to his 
work, it would be idle to pretend that lapse of time 
has not robbed it of much of its early prestige, and 
brought into stronger light those initial defects which, 
in its first novelty, were overlooked or condoned. 
" No one " — wrote Fielding — " will contend that the 
epistolary Style is in general the most proper to a 
Novelist " ; and what Fielding said in 1747 has been en- 
dorsed by the great majority of his successors in the art 
of fiction. Then Richardson's extraordinary diff useness 
and inordinate prolixity, both of which peculiarities were 
fully recognized by his contemporaries and by himself, 



196 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

must be allowed to be graver disadvantages than ever 
to-day, when, with the headlong hurry of life, the 
language of literature seems to tend less towards ex- 
pansion and leisurely expression than towards the 
cultus of the short-cut and the snap-shot. And besides 
these drawbacks of manner and method, there is the 
further difficulty that the author, who has been handed 
down to posterity as the first of our domestic novelists, 
persisted in regarding himself primarily as a moralist 
and preacher, and, to this end, burdened his text with 
a mass of matter didactic and hortatory, which, despite 
Johnson's dictum, it is hard to believe the bulk of his 
readers, unless they were widely different from the 
average humanity of all ages, really prized above the 
progress of the story. Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, who had 
strong views upon duelling, may have cared for the 
discussion upon that topic; and Miss Hester Mulso 
may have been interested in the pages dealing with 
parental authority ; but we suspect that Mrs. Townly, 
the toast, and Mrs. Lutestring, the seamstress, were 
much more concerned to learn how Clarissa Harlowe 
would escape from Lovelace, and whether Clementina 
or Harriet Byron would ultimately succeed in marrying 
Sir Charles. And if these things were felt by the 
author's first unjaded readers, they must be felt more 
than ever by the readers of to-day, who, having come 
into a not inconsiderable inheritance of fiction in the 
interim, 1 are by no means bound to burden themselves 
with the defects and superfluities of the pioneers in the 
art. It may be, as it is sometimes asserted, that there 
is a growing reaction in favour of the Eichardsonian 

1 At present about 1500 novels per annum (Times Supplement, 
25th July 1902). 



vii.] LAST YEARS AND GENERAL ESTIMATE 197 

method, and that the readers of our time, wearied with 
snippets and summaries, are about to turn once more 
to the copious and pedestrian pages of the Father of 
the English Novel. We doubt it. That there is an 
extraordinary quality about that nerveless, ambling, 
redundant style of his which, to those who persevere, 
gradually absorbs and fascinates, may readily be 
granted. Nevertheless, the conditions of modern life 
would appear to be hopelessly averse from the perusal 
of novels in seven or eight volumes, which novels, 
moreover, in spite of their admitted longueurs et lan- 
gueurs, appear to defy compression. 

But if, as we think, Bichardson's popularity with the 
public of the circulating library is never likely to revive 
again, his popularity is certain with the few — with 
those who, like Horace Walpole, either read what 
nobody else does, or, like Edward FitzGerald and 
Dr. Jowett, read only what takes their fancy. He 
must always find readers, too, with the students of 
literature. He was the pioneer of a new movement ; 
the first certificated practitioner of sentiment; the 
English Columbus of the analytical novel of ordinary 
life. Before him, no one had essayed in this field to 
describe the birth and growth of a new impression, to 
show the ebb and flow of emotion in a mind distraught, 
to follow the progress of a passion, to dive so deeply 
into the human heart as to leave — in Scott's expressive 
words — " neither head, bay, nor inlet behind him until 
he had traced its soundings, and laid it down in his 
chart, with all its minute sinuosities, its depths and 
shallows/' Added to this, there was a something in 
his nervous, high-strung constitution — a feminine 
streak as it were — which made him an unrivalled 



198 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

anatomist of female character. He seems to have 
known women more intimately and instinctively than 
any deceased author we can recall, and he has written 
of them with an interest, a patience, a discrimination, 
and a sustained power of microscopic inquiry which 
no author has surpassed. And they deserved it, for 
he was also deeply indebted to them. "Knowing 
something of the female heart," he tells Pastor Stinstra, 
"I could not be an utter stranger to that of man." 
The phrase betrays more than he intended. He knew 
women ; and through women he got his knowledge of 
men with its concomitant defects. What Hazlitt calls 
his " strong matter-of-fact imagination " did all the rest. 
With the unprecedented vogue of Eichardson during 
the literary years of his life, it might be supposed that 
he would be succeeded by a host of imitators. In his 
own country, however, his influence is not so markedly 
perceptible as it might have been, had his genius been 
less individual, and his artistic method more worthy of 
emulation. With him, no doubt, the stream of senti- 
ment has its original fount and origin; but its course 
was modified by other tendencies, and diverted into 
different channels. Hence, it is not entirely easy to 
point to this or that writer, and especially to this or 
that great writer who follows, and to say that he was 
largely energised by the author of Sir Charles Grandison 
and Clarissa, Sterne no doubt came after him, and 
Sterne, too, dealt, among other things, with sentiment. 
But, at its best, Sterne's sentiment is sentiment with a 
difference — a sentiment of an essence far subtler than 
anything in Eichardson, and smiling, with a queer con- 
tortion, through its tears. Of Brooke's Fool of Quality 
— that inconceivably tiresome book which Kingsley 



vii.] LAST YEARS AND GENERAL ESTIMATE 199 

praises for its " grand ethics," and its " absence of 
sentimentalism " [?] — it may indeed be affirmed that it 
shows the influence of Richardson, since it abounds 
both in weeping and moralities ; 1 and something of the 
same kind may be advanced of Henry Mackenzie's 
Man of Feeling , except that if Mackenzie is the disciple 
of Richardson, he has absorbed him through Sterne. 2 
Both the Man of Feeling and the Fool of Quality have, 
however, as pointed out by Miss Thomson, one 
affinity with Richardson, — they are preoccupied with 
questions of education, although this, as she is also 
careful to note, they may owe to Rousseau. But 
neither Mackenzie (in the Man of Feeling), nor Brooke, 
chose the epistolary style for their performances, as did 
that avowed Richardsonian, Miss Burney. Richard- 
son's novels had been the passion of her (Miss Burney's) 
girlhood, and her first book, Evelina, is written in 
letters. But although Johnson protested that there 
were passages in it which might do honour to the 
author of Clarissa, he also, by comparing her Holborn 
beau to Fielding, indicated sufficiently that Richardson's 
influence was intermixed with other influences which 



1 Brooke is occasionally almost reminiscent of Richardson. 
Of his hero, Harry Clinton, a character says: — " Let me go, 
let me go from this place. The boy will absolutely kill me if 
I stay any longer. He overpowers, he suffocates me with the 
weight of his sentiments." This is quite in the Harriet Byron 
vein:— "O my Aunt! be so good as to let the servants prepare 
my apartments at Selby House. There is no living within the 
blazing glory of this man." 

2 The introduction nevertheless seems intended to suggest 
kinship with Richardson: — "Had the name of a Marmontel or 
a Richardson been on the title-page, 'tis odds that I should 
have wept." Mackenzie's Julia de Roubigne, it may be added, 
is in letters. 



200 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

saved her from succumbing entirely to sensibility. In 
Miss Burney's successor, Miss Austen, we are again 
confronted with that writer's admiration for the author 
of her youth. She had him by heart, we are told. 
" Her knowledge of Richardson's works " — wrote her 
nephew and biographer, the Rev. S. E. Austen-Leigh, 
in 1870 — " was such as no one is likely again to 
acquire, now that the multitude and the merits of our 
light literature have called off the attention of readers 
from that great master." But, although Miss Austen 
too chose the "epistolary style" for the first form 
of Sense and Sensibility, the connection between her 
delicate craftsmanship and that of Richardson is 
not very manifest. Whatever she got from him 
must have been sublimed into something rarer and 
more refined, leaving nothing appreciable except the 
common attributes of minute imagination and mental 
analysis. 

One of the causes which no doubt tended to diminish 
or modify the influence of Richardson in his own 
country, was the fact that Fielding and Smollett were 
also exerting considerable influence in a different 
direction. But in France, where Fielding (in spite 
of Mr. Defreval) was imperfectly understood, and 
Smollett almost unknown, and where Marivaux had 
already prepared the ground for the novel of 
analysis, Richardson's welcome was immediate and 
unmistakable. Aided, in some measure, by that gentle 
Gallicising to which his " parts of speech " had been 
subjected, he at once obtained a currency which was 
absolutely unexampled, especially when it is remem- 
bered that France and England were, for the moment, 
politically opposed, and that Richardson's preface to 



vii.] LAST YEARS AND GENERAL ESTIMATE 201 

Pamela, in the words of the Journal de Police, 1 was 
" an insnlt to the entire French nation." In July 
1742 Crebillon told Lord Chesterfield that, without 
Pamela, the Parisians would not know what to read 
or to say. How the book was dramatised and 
imitated, has already been told in Chapter ii. Clarissa 
was even more successful ; and by the time Grandison 
appeared, in the words of the late M. Joseph Texte (to 
whose admirable chapter on Biehardson's influence in 
France we at this point cheerfully acknowledge our 
obligations), " admiration had become infatuation." 
The colossal Eloge of Diderot in Suard's Journal 
Etranger (1761) indicates the culminating point. In 
seventeen pages of breathless eulogy, 2 thrown off at a 
burst, Diderot dilates upon his theme. With much of 
this magniloquent rhapsody it is now difficult to sym- 
pathise, though of its sincerity there can be no doubt. 
Diderot was wrong — as M. Texte points out — in 
vaunting the purity of Clarissa at the expense of 
certain French writers ; in preferring its author before 
Montaigne, Nicole, and La Rochefoucauld for his 
knowledge of the human heart, and in commending 
him for a delicacy of art in which he is obviously 
deficient. But at least he had read him, he admired 
him enthusiastically, and he seized his distinctive 

1 The reference is apparently to the passage from Mr. 
Defreval's letter, thus impartially rendered by Prevost : — "Tu 
[Pamela] pourras servir de modele aux ecrivains d'une nation 
voisine, qui auront l'oecasion maintenant de recevoir en bon 
argent sterling, a la place de la fausse monnaie qui a eu si 
long-tems cours parmi nous dans des pieces ou Ton ne trouve 
que la legerete de cette inconstante nation." (CEuvres de 
Provost, Paris, 1784, i. xvi.). Why Prevost did not modify or 
soften this injudicious passage, is difficult to understand. 

2 Assezat's edition, 1875, vol. v. 



202 SAMUEL RICHARDSON [chap. 

characteristics. His admiration will not even admit 
that he is wearisome. "You accuse him of being 
tedious ! Have you then forgotten the trouble, the 
attention, the manoeuvring that are necessary be- 
fore the humblest enterprise can be brought to a 
successful issue — before a lawsuit can be ended, a 
marriage arranged, a reconciliation effected ? Think 
what you please of these details; but they will be 
interesting to me, if they are true, if they call the 
passions into play, if they exhibit character. * They 
are commonplace/ say you ; i this is what we see 
every day ? ? You are wrong ; it is what happens 
every day before your eyes, without your ever per- 
ceiving it. . . . Know that it is upon this multitude 
of little things that illusion depends : it is very difficult 
to imagine them : it is harder still to reproduce them." 
There is more : — of Eichardson' s analytic power, — 
of his fascination for the writer. " Richardson, 
Richardson — man unique in my eyes, you shall be my 
reading at all times ! " Forced by necessity, he will 
sell his books. But Eichardson he will keep — on the 
same shelf as Moses, Homer, Euripides, and Sophocles ; 
and he will study them by turns. 

Diderot praised Eichardson because Eichardson con- 
firmed his own theories ; Voltaire, on the other hand, 
and despite his own effort of Nanine, depreciated him 
because his views were opposed to those which he 
himself advocated. But, in 1760, just a year before 
Eichardson' s death had prompted the dithyrambs of 
Diderot, appeared a novel by a writer as great as either, 
La Nouvelle Heloise. That Eousseau was influenced by 
Eichardson, that he went beyond him in style, that he 
imported into his pages a nature- worship which he had 



vii.] LAST YEARS AND GENERAL ESTIMATE 203 

certainly not found in his model, that he had built 
upon Bichardson's basis with greater genius — are 
things which need not here be repeated. " Bichardson" 
— says M. Texte — " wrote a novel; and Kousseau 
writes a poem. The one is a very great novelist, but a 
very bad writer ; the other is an incomparable artist 
in words. The one has no style at all ; the other has 
renewed the French language from its foundation." 

This is the modern view. 1 But as Bichardson's 
novels during his life-time had been preferred, even in 
France, to the performances of Le Sage and Prevost 
and Marivaux, so after his death their popularity 
was but little affected by the masterpiece of Bousseau. 
He continued to be, as he had been, the model of the 
Anglo-maniacs, and the English novel remained the 
fashion in France for many years to come. As late as 
1785 a French critic was found to write — " Clarissa, 
the greatest among English novels, has also become 
the first among our own." And long after he ceased to 
be imitated, he continued to have admirers in Bous- 
seau's country, and admirers of the greatest, from 
Chateaubriand and Andre Chenier to George Sand 
and Alfred de Musset — Alfred de Musset, for whom 
Clarissa was " le premier Roman die Monde." 

Of a very definite kind was also Bichardson's influ- 
ence in Germany. Gellert the fabulist, as already 
mentioned, translated Pamela and Sir Charles Grandi- 
son, and came no whit behind Diderot in panegyric. 

1 It was not, of course, the view of the Critical Review for 
September 1761, which compared the two writers. Nor was it 
Richardson's, who is said to have decorated his own version 
of the New Eloisa with anything but notes of admiration. 
(Nichols's Anecdotes, 1812, iv. p. 598.) 



204 SAMUEL EICHARDSON [chap. vn. 

Eichardson' s works, he wrote, were imperishable : — 
they were nature, taste, and religion. Immortal as 
was Homer among Christians, Eichardson was more 
immortal still. Gellert went further; he emulated 
Eichardson in a long novel called Das Leben der 
Schwedischen Grafin von G. Hermes, Wieland, and a 
host of minor imitators, of whom the histories may be 
found in Erich Schmidt, 1 followed suit, and, like the 
French, they too carried Eichardson to the stage. 
Wieland took Clementina for the theme of a tragedy ; 
and Lessing's epoch-making drama of Miss Sara Samp- 
son, among other English influences, clearly betrays 
the study of Clarissa, while Coleridge traces Eichard- 
son in the Robbers of Schiller. Lastly, in the Grandi- 
son der Zweite of Musaeus, he suffered the penalty of 
Teutonic parody. 

1 Richardson, Rousseau und Gothe, 1875. 



INDEX 



Addison on " Bad endings," 98. 
JEsop's Fables, Richardson's, 76. 
Alcove, Poem on the, at Parson's 

Green, 173-174. 
Allen, Ralph, 169. 
Allington, Martha A., 10. 
Almira, Urania Johnson's, 179. 
Amelia, Fielding's, 116-119. 
Analysis of Beauty, Hogarth's, 

145. 
Anecdotes, Nichols's, 3, 188. 
Answer to the Letter, etc., on 

Clarissa, Richardson's, 101. 
Apology, Cibber's, 32. 
Apology for the Life of Mrs. 

Shamela Andrews, An, 42-45. 
Art of Politicks ,Brdimstoii's, 81n. 
Atterbury, Francis, Bishop of 

Rochester, 12, 13. 
Austen, Miss, 200. 
Austen-Leigh, Rev. S. E., 200. 
Author's Farce, Fielding's, 45. 



Bacon on Praise, 110. 

Balliol, Master of, The, 158, 197. 

Baltimore, Lord, 93 note. 

Banks, Miss Peggy, 78, 81. 

Barbauld, Mrs. Anna Lsetitia, 2, 
4, 8, 10, 11, 14, 25, 27, 31, 34, 36, 
39, 40, 41, 44, 52, 53, 54, 59 note, 
65, 80, 91, 94, 112, 116, 120, 126, 
133, 139, 163, 170, 188. 

Basire, James, 191 note. 



Beaumont, History of Mrs., 
Richardson's, 11. 

Bedlam, a visit to, 24. 

"Belford, John," 93. 

"Belfour, Mrs." (Lady Brads- 
haigh), 44, 83, 91, 97, 99, 107, 
109, 129, 141. 

Bell's Buildings, 175. 

Bennet, Mrs., 174. 

Betsy Thoughtless (Mrs. Hay- 
wood's), 116. 

"B.F." of the Fleet, 165. 

Blue Ball Court, 175. 

"B., Mr.," 35. 

Boccage, Mme. du, 49. 

Bradshaigh, Lady ("Mrs. Bel- 
four"), 132, 136, 144, 146, 159, 
160, 170, 192. 

Sir Roger, 132. 

Bridgen, Edward, 1, 4, 60 note, 
173, 194. 

Mrs. (Patty Richardson), 

136, 194. 

Bridges, Miss Ann, 14. 

Brothers, Young's, 135. 

Browne, Isaac Hawkins, 112. 

Burne-Jones, Sir E., 17 note. 

Burney, Charlotte, 122, 139. 

• Fanny, 122, 199. 

" Byron, Harriet," 17, 120. 

C 

Cambridge, Richard Owen, 112, 

114. 
Cameron, Dr. Archibald, 136. 



205 



206 



SAMUEL RICHARDSON 



Campbell, Henry, or Harry, 67, 

76, 187. 

Canons of Criticism, Edwards's, 

113. 
Carlyle, Thomas, 156. 
Carter, Miss (or Mrs.) Elizabeth, 

77, 121, 136, 146 note, 158, 196. 
Case of Samuel Richardson, The, 

etc. (Dublin Piracies) , 165. 

Centaur not Fabulous, The, 
Young's, 164. 

Chamberlin, Mason, 138, 192. 

Champion, Fielding's, 45, 54. 

Chandler, the bookseller, 55-56. 

Chapman, Elizabeth, 60 note. 

Chapone, John, 119, 123. 

Mrs., Senior, 119, 185, 186. 

Mrs., Junior (Hester Mulso) , 

122. 

Sally, 119. 

Chapter of Accidents, Miss Lee's, 
119. 

Chateaubriand, F. A. de, 203. 

Chateauneuf, Mme., 31 note. 

Chenier, Andre, 203. 

Chesterfield, Lord, 201. 

Chetwoode, Knightly, 59. 

Christ's Hospital, 3, 4. 

Chudleigh, Miss, 78, 81. 

Cibber, Colley, 45, 62, 74, 79, 80, 
81, 84, 96, 127, 136, 164. 

Cicero, Cibber 's, 134. 

Conyers Middleton's, 134. 

" Citizen of the World, A," 163. 

Citron, or Barbadoes Water, 
23. 

Clarissa; or, The History of a 
Young Lady, 82-105; pub- 
lished, 82-84; mode of issue, 
83 ; promises of title, 84 ; out- 
line of story, 83-86 ; character 
of heroine, 86-88; Mrs. Oli- 
phant on, 87-88; character of 
Lovelace, 88-91 ; its growth 
and development, 89-90 ; "Mrs. 
Belfour" on, 90-91; impunity 
of his wickedness, Mrs. Bar- 



bauld, Scott, H. D. Traill, and 
" Mr. Urban" on, 91-93; Rich- 
ardson's intention, 92-93 ; other 
characters of the book, 93-94; 
the author's masterpiece, 94-95 ; 
the catastrophe and its critics, 
95-97 ; " Mrs. Belfour's " view, 
97-99; Richardson's reply to 
objections, 99-100; defence of 
Lovelace's freedoms, 100-101; 
the fire-plot scene in particular, 
101-102; Clarissa's Meditations 
(1750), 102; abridgments, 103- 
104 ; abridgment needless, 
104-105; translations of Cla- 
rissa, 135; other references, 
68, 73-76, 128. 

Clergy, Wrongs of the, Richard- 
son on, 23. 

"Colbrand,"36. 

Collection of Voyages, Church- 
ill's, 77. 

Collier, Arthur, the metaphysi- 
cian, 111. 

Jane, 109, 111. 

Margaret, 105, 111, 132. 

Corney House, 16. 

Correspondence, Richardson's, at 
South Kensington, 51-53. 

Costume, Richardson on, 21-22. 

Courthope, Mr. W. J., 70. 

Court of Censorial Enquiry, 
Fielding's, 117. 

Covent Garden Journal, Field- 
ing's, 117. 

Crebillon, the younger, C. P. 
Jolyot de, 201; on Marivaux, 
48. 

Critical Reflections on Propriety 
in Writing, etc., Hill's, 72. 

Crowther, Mrs. (Sally Richard- 
son), 194. 

Cry, The, Sarah Fielding's and 
Jane Collier's, 111. 

Cynthia, Ode to, Miss Farrer's, 
125. 

Cyprus wine, 23. 



INDEX 



207 



Dallas, E. S., 103. 

" Davers, Lady," 36, 39, 40, 41. 

David Simple, Sarah Fielding's, 

109, 116. 
Dean of Coleraine, Prevost's, 135. 
Defreyal, J. B., 128, 129, 200, 201 

note. 
Deity, Boyse's, 32. 
Delany, Dr. Patrick, 60, 62, 116. 
Mrs., 102, 120 note, 134, 143, 

170, 172. 
De* route des Pamela, La, Dau- 

cour's, 48. 
Desnoyers, Mons., 31 note. 
Dewes, Mrs., 102, 119, 143, 144. 
Diderot, Denis, 49, 59, 201-202. 
Distrest Mother, Philips's, 39. 
Ditcher, Philip, 185, 194. 
Dodd, the bookseller, 44. 
Donnellan, Mrs., 116, 120 note, 

127, 136, 143, 144, 170. 
Dublin pirates of Grandison, 165- 

168. 
Duncombe, Rev. John, 124, 126, 

139. 
D'Urfe, Honore', 32. 

E 

Earl of Essex, Henry Jones's, 135. 

Echlin, Lady, 170, 174, 178. 

Edwards, Thomas, 102, 105, 112- 
114, 120, 121, 125, 136, 171, 174. 

Elmeric, Lillo's, 32. 

feloge de Richardson, Diderot's, 
201-202. 

Ember, or Imber Court, 14. 

Emerson on Bias, 4. 

Emmert, J. H., 103. 

Epictetus, Mrs. Carter's, 77. 

Erskine, Hon. Thomas, 100. 

Essay on Light Reading, Man- 
gin's, 40. 

Essay on Man, Pope's, 71. 

Evelina, Miss Burney's, 199. 

" Execution Day," Richardson 
on, 25. 



Familiar Letters between the 
Principal Characters in David 
Simple, etc., Sarah Fielding's, 
110. 

Familiar Letters, Richardson's, 
19-25; their origin, 18; publi- 
cation in January (1741), 19; 
preface, 19; on the law's de- 
lays, 20; on contemporary 
politics, 21; on the new riding 
habit, 21; on singing and 
music, 22; on the theatrical 
profession, 22; on sailors, 23; 
on the inferior clergy, 23; on 
Vauxhall, Westminster Abbey, 
Bedlam, the theatre, and " Exe- 
cution Day," 23-25; remarks 
of Richardson, Barbauld, Jef- 
frey, and Scott on this book, 
25; other references, 31 note, 
50, 171. 

Fanciad, Hill's, 68. 

Farr, Dr., 176. 

Faulkner, the Dublin printer, 165. 

Fausan, Signor and Signora, 31 
note. 

Female Quixote, Charlotte 
Lenox's, 134. 

Feminead, Duncombe's, 125. 

Fielding, Henry, 32, 43, 44, 96, 
106, 107-109, 111, 112, 116-119, 
121, 146, 162, 195, 200; on 
high life, 157 note; on pref- 
aces, 37. 

Sarah, 64, 109-110. 

FitzGerald, Edward, 104, 197. 

Fool of Quality, Brooke's, 198- 
199. 

Forman, Mr. H. Buxton, 102 note. 

Forster, John, 53, 111. 

Forsyth, William, 40. 

Fortune-hunters, 19, 171. 

Frampton, Mr. George, A.R.A., 
192. 

Frasi, Signora Giulia, 79. 

French Dancers, The, 31. 



208 



SAMUEL RICHARDSON 



Fulham, Old and New, Mr. C. J. 
Feret's, 17 note. 

G 

Gainsborough, Earl of, 60 note. 

Lady, 59 note. 

Gamester, Moore's, 135. 

Garrick, David, 48, 79, 135. 

Gay, John, 24, 61. 

Gazetteer, Richardson and the, 
15, 70-71. 

Gellert, C. F., 179, 203-204. 

Genlis, Mine, de, 173. 

Gent, Thomas, 7, 13, 14, 32. 

Gideon ; or, the Patriot, Hill's, 
73. 

Goldsmith, Oliver, 163 ; employed 
by Richardson, 176; his Good- 
Natufd Man, 118. 

Good-Natur' d Man, Goldsmith's, 
118. 

Grandison der Zweite, Musaeus', 
204. 

Grandison, Sir Charles, The His- 
tory of, 140-168 ; growth of the 
idea, 142; its difficulties, 143; 
delineation of high life, 143- 
145; published, 145-146; John- 
son on the Preface, 146 ; the 
the author's assistants, 146 
note ; outline of story, 147-156 ; 
the hero, 156-157; the other 
characters, 158; Miss Grandi- 
son, 158-159 ; replies to critics, 
160-162 ; reception of the book, 
163-164; testimony of "B. F." 
of the Fleet, 165; piracy of 
the work by Messrs. Exshaw, 
Saunders, and Wilson of Dub- 
lin, 165-168. 

Grange at Hammersmith, The, 
16-17. 

Graves, Rev. Richard, 169. 

Gray's Inn Journal, Murphy's, 
166. 

Grimm, Baron, 49. 



Grotto at North End, The, 17, 

138, 173. 
Guillemot, M. Ernest, 103. 
Gunnings, The Miss, 115. 

H 
Haller, Dr., 135. 
Harcourt, Lord, 79. 
Hardy, Mr. Thomas, 6. 
Hazelrigg, Lady, 59 note. 
Hazlitt, Dr., 74. 

William, 198. 

Henault, President, 49. 
Herbert, George, 155. 
Hermes, 204. 

" Hickman, Mr.," 95, 142. 
Highmore, Joseph, 123-124, 132, 

191, 192. 
Miss Susannah, 79, 123, 126, 

138, 139, 142. 
Hill, Aaron, 14, 27 note, 28, 38, 

46, 50, 51, 54 note, 65-76, 88, 90. 

Astrsea, 66, 67, 107, 109. 

Dr. Birkbeck, 79, 147 note. 

Minerva, 66, 67, 107, 109. 

Urania (Mrs. Johnson), 66, 

67, 178-179. 
Historia sui Temporis, De Thou's, 

77. 
Hobbinol, Somerville's, 32. 
Hob in the Well, Hippisley's, 24. 
Hogarth, William, 136-137. 
Hogarth's Apprentice Series, 8, 

10. 
Honors t, Major, 180, 194. 
Hone, N., 63. 
Horse Subsecivsd, Brown's, 27 

note. 
"Howe, Miss," 93. 
Hunt, Leigh, 3-4. 



Italian Dancers, The, 31. 



Jacobite's Journal, Fielding's, 
106. 



INDEX 



209 



Janin, Jules, 103. 

Jean Jacques Rousseau et le Cos- 

mopolitisme litUraire, Texte's, 

201. 
Jenny and Jemmy Jessamy, Mrs. 

Haywood's, 124. 
"Jervis, Mrs.," 36. 
" Jewkes, Mrs.," 36,44. 
Jodrell, Gilbert, 171. 
Johnson, Dr., 83 note, 100, 110, 

121, 136-137, 146, 177 ; his pro- 
logue tc the Good-Natur 3 d 

Marty 22 note. 
Mrs. (Urania Hill), 66, 67, 

178-179. 
Joseph Andrews, Fielding's, 45- 

46, 56 note, 65, 106, 107. 
Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, 

Fielding's, 37, 112. 
Journal to Stella, Swift's, 52. 
Jowett, Dr., 158, 197. 
Julia de Roubignt, Mackenzie's, 

199 note. 

K 
Kelly, John, 55, 56. 
Kettleby, Mr., 24. 
" Keyber, Mr. Conny," 42, 45. 
Klopstock, F. T., 180-183. 
Mrs. (Margaretha or Meta 

Moller), 180-183. 



Lady 3 s Lecture, The, Cibber's, 79, 

80. 
Lang, Mrs. Andrew, 157 note. 
La Rochefoucauld, Francois de, 

201. 
Larroumet, M. Gustave, 49. 
Lavengro, Borrow's, 53. 
Law's delays, The, Richardson 

on, 20, 21. 
Leake, Elizabeth, Richardson's 

second wife, 15, 192. 
James, of Bath, 15, 54, 56, 

59, 169. 
Leben der Schwedischen Grafin 

von G., Gellert's, 204. 



Lenox, Mrs. Charlotte, 134, 136. 
Letters on the Improvement of 

the Mind, Chapone's, 120, 122. 
Letters written to and for par' 

ticular Friends, Richardson's, 

19-25. 
Lincoln, Lady, 78. 
Lintot, Henry, 185. 

Miss Catherine, 185, 186. 

Lloyd's Printing-office, 176. 

Locke, John, 39, 116. 

Loggan, the dwarf artist, 78, 79. 

London, Maitland's, 77. 

" Longman, Mr.," 36. 

" Lovelace, Robert," 13, 85-93. 

"Low" as a form of censure, 

118-119. 
Lowe, Solomon, 108-109. 
Lyttelton, Mr., 96. 

M 

Macmillan, Mr. Malcolm Kings- 
ley, 2 note. 

Maid of the Mill, Bickers taffe's, 
48. 

Mangin, Rev. E., 40, 188. 

Man of Feeling, Mackenzie's, 199. 

Marchmont, Lord, 70. 

Marivaux, P. Carlet de, 48, 49, 
200. 

Marmontel, J. F., 199 note. 

Meditations, Clarissa's, 85 note, 
102, 113. 

Micawber, Mr. Wilkins, 62. 

Minor, Foote's, 8. 

Millar, Andrew, 187, 188 note. 

Miss Sara Sampson, Lessing's, 
204. 

Monmouth, Duke of, 2, 3. 

Montagu, Mrs., 144. 

Montaigne, Michel de, 201. 

Moore, Edward, 125. 

Moral and Instructive Senti- 
ments, Collection of, 9-10, 183- 
185. 

Much Ado about Nothing, 113 
note. 



210 



SAMUEL RICHARDSON 



Mulso, Miss Hester (Mrs. Cha- 
pone, Junior), 120-123, 125, 139, 
145, 147, 196. 

Mr. Edward, 138. 

Mrs. Edward, 139. 

Mulso, Mr. Thomas, 120, 123, 124, 
138. 

Murphy, Arthur, 44, 166, 177. 

Murray, Mr. Fairfax, 17 note. 

Music, Richardson on, 22. 

Musset, Alfred de, 203. 

N 

Nanine ; ou, le Prtjuge vaincu, 

Voltaire's, 48, 202. 
Nash, Richard, 78. 
Negotiations of Sir Thomas Roe, 

76. 
New Lucian, Traill's, 92. 
Nicole, P., 201. 

Night Thoughts, Young's, 62, 77. 
Norfolk, Duchess of, 78. 
Nouvelle Helo'ise, Rousseau's, 

202. 
Novelists, Lives of the, Scott's, 

42. 
Novels, number per annum, 196. 

O 

Octavia and Cleopatra, Miss 

Fielding's, 64. 
Ogle, Dr. Newton, 122. 
Oglethorpe, General, 65. 
Oliphant, Mrs., 40, 87. 
Onslow, Arthur, the Speaker, 14, 

71, 79, 112, 136, 170, 172. 
Orrery, Lord, 134. 
Osborn, John, of Paternoster 

Row, 15, 18, 19, 30, 38. 
Ottoman Empire, History of the, 

Hill's, 65. 
Oxford, The Bishop of (Dr. 

Seeker), 158, 159, 170. 



Poimela ; or, Virtue Rewarded, 
26-50; account of its origin, 



18, 26-30, 27 note ; when writ- 
ten, 27; connection with Fa- 
miliar Letters, 27; foundation 
of story, 28-30; published, 30; 
full title, 30 ; announcement in 
Gentleman's Magazine respect- 
ing, 30-31; further editions, 
31 ; reception by the public, 31 ; 
at Ranelagh, 31 ; recommended 
from the pulpit, 31; Pope on, 
31; at Slough, 31; Lettre sur 
Pamela (1742), 32; English 
Literature when it appeared, 
32; its characteristics, 33; its 
heroine, 34-35; other charac- 
ters, etc., 36; Preface, and In- 
troduction to second edition, 
37 ; Pamela's Conduct in High 
Life, Kelly's, 38-39, 54-57; 
second and third volumes of 
Pamela, 39, 54-58; its mo- 
rality, 40-41; Apology for 
Mrs. Shamela Andrews, 42-45 ; 
Fielding's Joseph Andrews, 45- 
47 ; pronunciation of heroine's 
name, 46; on the stage, 47; in 
waxwork, 47 note; Pamela 
and Marivaux's Vie de Mari- 
anne, 48-50; other references, 
66-68, 99. 

Pamela, a comedy, Dance's, 47. 

Censured, 42. 

Maritata, Goldoni's, 48. 

Nivelle de la Chaussee's, 

48. 

Nubile, Goldoni's, 48.^ 

ou, la Vertu Mieux Eprou- 

v4e, De Boissy's, 48. 

Pamela's Conduct in High Life, 
Kelly's, 38-39, 54-57. 

Panckoucke, Andre, 103. 

Parson's Green, Richardson's 
house at, 127, 171-174; sketch 

* of, by Malcolm, 173; cut by 
Sears, 173 note. 

Pasquin, Fielding's, 45. 

Payne, T., bookseller, 12. 



INDEX 



211 



Paysan Parvenu, Marivaux's, 

49. 
Pelham, Ode to, Garrick's, 145. 
Pendarves, Mrs., 116. 
Peterborough, Lord, 92 note. 
Phillips, Mrs. Katherine, 125. 

Sir Richard, 52. 

Pilkington, Mrs., 60-64, 65, 96, 

125. 

John Carteret, 63. 

Piracy of Sir Charles Grandison, 

165-168. 
Pitt, Mr., 78. 
Place, M. de la, 129. 
Politics, Richardson on, 21. 
Pope, 46, 58, 59, 61, 68-73; his 

character of Wharton, 13. 
Powis, Lord, 79. 
Pratt, Mr., 171. 
Prescott, Miss, 123, 139. 
Prevost, Abbe, 4, 40, 103, 135, 

201 note. 
Prior, Matthew, 24. 

Thomas, on Tar-water, 64. 

Psalmanazar, G., 60. 
Purcell, R., 63 note. 

R 

Rambler, Richardson in the, 133. 
Ranelagh, Conntess of, 16. 
Reading, The Six Ladies of, 59- 

60. 
Reich, Erasmus, of Leipzig, 17, 

173. 
Richardson, Anne or Nancy, 15, 

52, 145, 194. 

Benjamin, 187. 

— Martha or Patty (Mrs. 

Bridgen),15, 132, 194. 
Mary or Polly (Mrs. Ditcher) , 

15, 185, 187, 194. 
Mrs. (Richardson's mother) , 

2. 
Mrs. (Elizabeth Leake) , 15, 

172, 175, 188, 193. 
Mrs. (Martha Wilde), 10, 15, 

187. 



Richardson, Rousseau, und 
Goethe, Erich Schmidt's, 204. 

Richardson, Samuel (Richard- 
son's father), 1, 2, 7. 

(Richardson's son), 15. 

born in 1689, 1; his 

father, 1 ; his mother, 2; father 
retires to Derbyshire, 2; his 
school days, 3 ; a story-teller 
as a boy, 4; a letter-writer, 
5; admonishes a back-biting 
widow, 5 ; reader to the neigh- 
bourhood, 5 ; a secretary to the 
young women, 6, 7; appren- 
ticed to John Wilde, printer, 
7 ; his 'prentice days, 8-9 ; cor- 
respondence with an unnamed 
gentleman, 9 ; works as a com- 
positor, etc., 9; takes up his 
freedom, 9; begins business in 
Fleet Street, 9; marries his 
master's daughter, 23rd Nov. 
1721, 10; prior attachments, 
10-11; his children, 11-12; The 
True Briton and the Duke of 
Wharton (1723), 12; moves 
from Fleet Street to Salisbury 
Court (1724) , 13 ; acquaintance 
with Mr. Speaker Onslow, 14; 
prints Journals of the House 
of Commons, 14; death of 
Martha Richardson, 15; mar- 
ries Elizabeth Leake, 15; his 
children, 15 ; prints Daily Jour- 
nal and Daily Gazetteer (1736- 
1738) , 15 ; printer to the Society 
for the Encouragement of 
Learning, 15; residence at 
Corney House, 16; takes No. 
Ill, The Grange, North End 
Road, Fulham (1739), 16 ; house 
described, 16-17; writes the 
Familiar Letters (1739-1740), 
18-19; writes Pamela; or, 
Virtue Rewarded (1739-1740), 
27 ; correspondence (1739-1748) , 
51-76; Negotiations of Sir 



212 



SAMUEL RICHARDSON 



Thomas Roe (1740) , 76 ; ^Esop's 
Fables, 76 ; Defoe's Tour 
through Great Britain, 3rd 
edition, 77; books printed by 
him, 77; at Tunbridge Wells, 
78; writes Clarissa; or, The 
History of a Young Lady 
(1744-1748) , 73-76 ; contributes 
to Johnson's Rambler, 133; 
correspondence (1749-1754) , 
106-137 ; writes The History of 
Sir Charles Grandison (1749- 
1754), 140-145; the Dublin pi- 
racies, 165-168 ; Master of the 
Stationers' Company, 171; re- 
moves to Parson's Green (Octo- 
ber, 1754), 171-174; alterations 
and new house at Salisbury 
Court, 174H76; his business, 
176; Collection of Moral and 
Instructive Sentiments, etc, 
(1755) , 183 ; marriage of Mary 
Richardson (1757), 185; part- 
nership with Miss Catherine 
Lintot, 185, 186; illness, and 
death at Parson's Green on 
4th July, 1761, 187 ; buried in 
St. Bride's, Fleet Street, 187; 
his will, 187-188; editions of 
his works and correspondence, 
188-189 ; his character, 189-191 ; 
portraits, 191-192; his wives, 
192-193; his daughters, 193- 
195; his works, 195-198; his 
influence in England, 198-200; 
in France, 200-203; in Ger- 
many, 203-204. 

Richardson, Sarah or Sally (Mrs. 
Crowther), 15,194. 

William, Richardson's 

nephew, 177, 185, 188. 

William, Richardson's 

brother, 187. 

Rivington, Charles, of St. Paul's 
Churchyard, 15, 18, 19, 30. 

Robbers, Schiller's, 204. 

Robinson, Mr. T. R., 12. 



Sir Thomas, 170. 

Rochester, Bishop of, Francis 

Atterbury, 12, 13. 
Roe, Sir Thomas, 18, 76. 
Romances, The old French, 32. 
Romeo and Juliet, 113 note. 
Rousseau, J. J., 101, 103, 202. 
Ruins of Rome, Dyer's, 32. 
Ruskin, John, 158. 

S 

St. Bride Foundation Institute, 
192. 

Salisbury, Bishop of (Dr. Gil- 
bert), 79. 

Salisbury Court, New house and 
premises at, 174-176. 

Saunders, Sir Edmund, 172. 

Savage, Richard, 165. 

Scott, Sir Walter, 25, 42, 43, 91, 
197. 

Scudamore, Mr., 115. 

Scudery, Madeleine de, 32. 

Seeker, Dr., Bishop of Oxford, 
159. 

"Selby House," 17. 

Sense and Sensibility, Miss Aus- 
ten's, 200. 

Servant's Sure Guide to Fortune, 
The, 43 note. 

Shaftesbury, Earl of, 2. 

Shamela, 42-45, 106, 107. 

Sheridan, R. B., 169. 

She Stoops to Conquer, Gold- 
smith's, 119. 

Shovel, Sir Cloudesley, 24. 

Singing, Richardson on, 22. 

Sir Charles Grandison, 65, 138- 
168. 

Siris, Bishop Berkeley's, 64. 

Skelton, Mr., 128. 

" Slipslop, Mrs.," 36, 44. 

Smith, John or Justice, 16. 

Smollett, Tobias, 200. 

" Society for the Encouragement 
of Learning," The, 76. 

Stage, Richardson on the, 22, 24. 



INDEX 



213 



Stationers' Company, 179. 

Steel, 64. 

Stinstra, Pastor J., 7, 53, 135, 179, 
198. 

Stone, Mr. Marcus, R.A., 36. 

Summer-house at North End, 16, 
17, 138, 173. 

Supplement to Warburton's Edi- 
tion of Shakespea re, Edwards's, 
113. 

Sutton, Miss, 116, 136, 142, 145, 
170. 

Swift, Jonathan, 61. 

Orrery's Remarks, 134. 

Sylvester, Eusebius, 179. 



Taine, M. Hippolyte, 158. 
Talbot, Miss, 136, 146 note, 158, 

178. 
Tar-water, 64. 
Taste, Foote's, 144. 
Taylor, Dr. James, 172. 
Tender Husband, Steele's, 39. 
Tennyson, Lord, 104. 
Tewley, Mr. (Richardson's fore- 
man), 176. 
Texte, M. Joseph, 101, 103, 154, 

201, 203. 
Thackeray, W. M., 10. 
Theodore, Corneille's, 100, 101. 
Thomson, James, 96. 

Miss Clara L., 10, 43, 193. 

Tillotson, Archbishop, 155. 
Tom Jones, Fielding's, 107-109, 

128, 140. 
Tom Jones in his Married State, 

38. 
" Tommy Pots," The Tale of, 4. 
Toupees, 115. 
Toupets, 81, 115. 
Tour through Great Britain, 

Defoe's, 77. 
Traill, H. D., 91. 
Treatise on Poetry, Aristotle's 

(Twining's), 91 note. 



Treatise upon Acting, Hill's, 

82. 
Trentham, Lord, 170. 
True Briton, The, 12. 
Trulliber, Parson, 36. 
Tunbridge Wells in 1748, 78, 79. 

U 

Unfortunate Princess, Mrs. Hay- 
wood's, 32. 



Vanderplank, Mr. Samuel, 16, 

171. 
Vauxhall, 23. 
Victor, Benjamin, 178. 
Vie de Marianne, Marivaux's, 

48. 
Villemain, A., 103. 
Virgil Travestied, Cotton's, 118. 
Virgin in Eden, The, 42. 
Voltaire, F. Arouet de, 48, 203. 

W 

Walpole, Horace, 197. 
Warburton, Bishop, 58, 59, 114, 

170. 
Ward, Mrs., 103. 
Watts, Dr., on Pamela, 40, 41, 

53. 
Westcomb, Miss, 80, 114. 

Mrs., 114. 

Westminster Abbey, 24. 
Wharton, Philip, Duke of, 12, 13, 

89. 
Whiston, William, 79. 
White Lyon Court, Richardson's 

premises in, 175. 
Widoiv of the Wood, Victor's, 

178. 
Wieland, C. M., 204. 
Wilde, Allington, of Clerkenwell, 

10, 187. 

John, 7, 10. 

Martha, Richardson's first 

wife, 10, 187, 192. 



214 



SAMUEL RICHARDSON 



Williams, Miss (Johnson's), 121. 
Winchilsea, Anne, Countess of, 

125. 
Wisdom, Ode on, Miss Carter's, 

136. 
Woodfall, Henry, 14. 
Worde, Wynkyn de, 187. 



Wordsworth, William, 25. 
Wortley-Montagu, Lady Mary, 

158, 170. 
Wright, Mr. Aldis, 104. 



Young, E., 64, 65, 75, 164. 



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